The Spy

Editor's Note

César Aira has become a cult fiction writer in his native Argentina as well as throughout Latin America for his hyperrealist treatment of surreal or implausible scenarios and his aggressive defiance of literary conventions. His trajectory has also gone hand-in-hand with a unique take on genre and the book as medium. The first thing to catch one’s eye upon taking a quick glance at his bio is that he has published a truly staggering amount of books. BOMB was one of the first American publications to publish Aira in translation. When running “The Spy” in 2001, Aira was credited with having published 40 books. New Directions, his American publisher — which will release Chris Andrews’s translation of the extraordinary novella Shantytown this fall — notes that Aira has authored more than 80 titles in Latin America and Spain, which have been translated into at least seven languages.

Aira is undeniably prolific, but he admits that his production might appear more voluminous than it actually is, given that at least half of all his published works are under 20 pages long. In an interview on Denmark’s Louisiana Channel, he explains that he dislikes collections and therefore prefers “one book to one story.” Even a work like “The Spy,” which is closer to a story than a novel, would be more fit for an individual chapbook than a collection of short stories. “Big publishing houses want fat books,” Aira argued, and so his output has been bolstered by the emergence of independent micropublishers in Argentina and Latin America that have been willing to put out his unclassifiable works. Their print runs and distribution might be lacking in numbers, but Aira is actually fond of this model. He likes that his books “don’t go offering themselves to readers — like prostitutes, almost,” and prefers that readers make the effort to go searching for them. He consider himself an “unrepentant reader” who has always been able to hunt down seemingly unattainable works, and as such, believes that if people really want to read his books, they will find them.

And so indeed, after hearing much of Aira but unable to find any of his work translated into English, BOMB commissioned Alfred Mac Adam to render “The Spy” into English for the Winter 2001 Americas Issue. Mac Adam knew of Aira, but recalls that “his works were hard to get in those days, because he published (as he does to this day) in obscure, often provincial presses.” Later Aira was kind enough to grant us a rare interview in 2009. In a typically understated fashion, he states that prior to embarking on a new work, he has no grand ambitions — he’s only a writer when he’s writing.

Mónica de la Torre, Senior Editor BOMB Magazine