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How I Became a Nun

by César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translator)

3.73 of 5 stars 3.73 · rating details · 447 ratings · 78 reviews

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the vei...more

Paperback, 117 pages

Published February 28th 2007 by New Directions (first published 1993)

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Aug 28, 2012 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: argentina, fiction

No such thing! The "I" of César Aira's How I Became a Nun does not, in the course of this short novel become a nun. All the more so, because the main character morphs incessantly from being a little girl (unnamed) and a little boy named César Aira, who, like the eponymous author, is from Coronel Pringles in the State of Buenos Aires.

But then we are in Aira country, where strange things happen and in turn morph into even stranger ones. The story begins with the narrator of indeterminate gender b...more No such thing! The "I" of César Aira's How I Became a Nun does not, in the course of this short novel become a nun. All the more so, because the main character morphs incessantly from being a little girl (unnamed) and a little boy named César Aira, who, like the eponymous author, is from Coronel Pringles in the State of Buenos Aires.

But then we are in Aira country, where strange things happen and in turn morph into even stranger ones. The story begins with the narrator of indeterminate gender being taken by his/her father to an ice cream store to taste -- for the first time -- ice cream in the big city of Rosario to which the family had just moved. The strawberry ice cream cone does not have the desired effect, however, and the narrator finds it completely inedible. The father upbraids the hero/ine until, finally, he takes a taste himself and spits it out. He marches back into the store and demands that the clerk taste the cone, which he refuses to do. We learn from author Aira that:

I was a victim of the terrible cyanide contamination ... the great wave of lethal food poisoning that was sweeping Argentina and the neighboring countries that year ... The air was thick with fear, because it struck when least expected, any foodstuff could be contaminated, even the most natural ... potatoes, pumpkin, meat, rice oranges ... In my case it was ice cream.

The father pushes the clerk's head into the vat of strawberry ice cream until he dies. He is arrested and made to serve an eight-year term for his crime.

In any case, once she gets released from the hospital, the narrator gets on with his/her life, being called alternately a boy or a girl -- sometimes even within the same scene. As I read the book, I kept noting the gender with the male or female symbol as appropriate. (There were approximately forty such switches.)

There are two quotes in the novel that give you an idea of how the crafty Aira the author was leading us on. On page 68: "Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it ..." Then, on page 106: "I was incorrigible. The game was my freedom."

I will not divulge the odd surprise ending, but do note that any number of endings were possible by the time the narrator has lived a full year after the ice cream incident. It just happened to be the one that Aira the author pulled out of his capacious top hat.
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Jan 31, 2009 Deana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008, library-book, 4-5stars

This book was originally written in Spanish, and translated to English. Actually, the English was very good, I wouldn't have known this was the case except that it was mentioned on the back cover.

But I do wonder if it leads to one of my biggest confusions of this book. Is this a boy, or a girl? In real life, César is male. This is obvious from his website and of course the Wikipedia article. His father calls him an awful boy, a horrible son when César does not like the ice cream his father bough...more

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Jun 10, 2011 Lee rated it 3 of 5 stars

A generous three stars for this intentionally confounded, maybe too readable story about the confusions of early youth. It starts promisingly, with a vivid, clear, clever, simple scene, but soon after devolves into Celinesque delirium (lots of ellipses, I mean), and thereafter rarely accelerates. Representative thematic (not stylistic) sentence is probably: "It was a transformation of reality . . . The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream tur...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Trevor rated it 4 of 5 stars

How I Became a Nun starts with the sense of immediacy most other books only try to build up to. The opening thirty pages are intense and worth reading in and of themselves. In them we meet our narrator, a young boy (or girl, if you rely on her account) named César Aira, who has just moved from a small interior town to a larger town. To his father’s delight, ice cream is available in the larger town, and, remembering his own excellent experiences with ice cream, the father is taking the young son...more How I Became a Nun starts with the sense of immediacy most other books only try to build up to. The opening thirty pages are intense and worth reading in and of themselves. In them we meet our narrator, a young boy (or girl, if you rely on her account) named César Aira, who has just moved from a small interior town to a larger town. To his father’s delight, ice cream is available in the larger town, and, remembering his own excellent experiences with ice cream, the father is taking the young son for his first taste. Shockingly, touching his first spoonful to his mouth, César hates it, can’t even manage to swallow it so awful is the taste. The unbelieving father becomes indignant and finally outraged. How can anyone not like strawberry ice cream? This incident becomes somehow very important to the narrator’s development:

"My story, the story of “how I became a nun,” began very early in my life: I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil."

Once this excellently rendered episode is over, the narrator takes us into a chilling fever dream, complete with doppelgänger parents, wherein the narrator is able to step out of the story for a moment in order to see from the outside her story moving onward (all of the ellipses in the following quote are Aira’s own):

"Over all these stories hovered another, more conventional in a way, but more fantastic too. Separate from the series, it functioned like a “background,” always there. It was a kind of static story . . . a chilling episode, with a wealth of horrific details . . . It filled me with dread, making the four-part delirium seem like light entertainment by comparison . . . Except that it wasn’t just one more element, a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky . . . it was everything that was happening to me . . . everything that would happen to me in an eternity that had not yet begun and would never end . . . I was the girl in an illustrated book of fairy tales; I had become a myth . . . I was seeing it from inside . . ."

This section is so different in form from the first section that I began to wonder just what kind of story I was entering. Then the next section came along, and it was very different from the first two. Again, that is part of the creative process that is on display in the form of the novella. And again, Aira ties this process into the substance of the themes underlying the strange narrative: creation of a personal narrative, identity, mimicry, parental figures’ role in all of the above.

"The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupil’s abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me."

Like most of Aira's novellas, this book is packed with pleasure and intellect. My only problem was that each section is so separate and distinct from the one preceding it that it felt episodic and, therefore, lacked of the powerful forward thrust he often employs. But . . . as annoyed as I was that every ten pages or so I was thrown out of the narrative and dropped into a strange new place, once I settled down and thought about the form (form is so important to Aira, which I find ironic since his works seem so formless and ad hoc), things started to make sense. These gaps in the narrative are fundamental to the strangeness of Aira’s themes. That they are not discussed (or even, apparently, recognized) by the narrator is just as strange as the fact that he never seems cognizant of the little gender discrepancy so often apparent to the reader but never remarked upon in any way by any of the characters.

Aira gives me the impression that for him writing is a discovery process, and he doesn’t mind making the reader come along the way. As polished as his novels are, they come off feeling like the spiritual cousin to an old fashioned essay—the intial “trying” brings about a complete result where both author and reader are fulfilled.(less)

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May 29, 2009 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

I came across an article somewhere that hotly recommended Aira's work — the most exciting Argentine novelist of our time, or words to that effect — so I thought I'd give him a try. Discovering that his novels are short — this one's barely more than a novella — encouraged my experimental zeal.

Despite the title, our narrator may be a boy rather than a girl: sometimes the text says one, sometimes the other. This is either annoying or amusing in a whimsical sort of a way, depending on the reader's m...more

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Mar 28, 2010 Gina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, borrowed, fiction, general-fiction, 4-star

Sometimes I feel like I get stuck in a reading rut, so yesterday at the library I decided to find one book by an author I'd never heard of. I wanted something short that didn't involve broken/breaking marriages, quirky southern characters, or twenty-something women working in publishing in New York and/or trying to find love. This rules out a shocking number of books, so it took me a long time, but I eventually found this tiny book hidden at the beginning of the alphabet. There's no summary on t...more Sometimes I feel like I get stuck in a reading rut, so yesterday at the library I decided to find one book by an author I'd never heard of. I wanted something short that didn't involve broken/breaking marriages, quirky southern characters, or twenty-something women working in publishing in New York and/or trying to find love. This rules out a shocking number of books, so it took me a long time, but I eventually found this tiny book hidden at the beginning of the alphabet. There's no summary on the back or inside flap (after reading it I don't see how you could write one), but it looked intriguing and I have a mild nun obsession, so I took it home.

I have this pet peeve...It involves punctuation...Specifically the extreme overuse of ellipses...It actually seemed to work in this case...since it's mostly used to describe periods of delirium...I'm really glad it wasn't the whole book, though.

Reading this book is sort of like having a really strange dream. It's bizarre and sinister but also really funny. I don't know exactly what the author's intention was in writing this, but it made me think about how strange life seems sometimes when you're a child. I remember being six and not having a clue what was going on. Everything was planned for me and some days I had to go to school where we had to do a series of pointless and unrelated things and occasionally we filed into the cafeteria and sat on the floor while some man talked to us about something or other, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. One day an older girl sang "The Wind Beneath My Wings" and looking back I suppose that this must have been part of a talent show, but to my kindergarten self it was just one of those strange things that happened to me everyday. This is supposedly an "autobiographical" novel, but obviously not everything in this book can be true, since much of it is contradictory. Isn't that part of memory, though? I have some absurd "memories" that can't possibly be true, and some of the other things I remember are contradicted by my siblings or actual documentation.

Cesar was a odd little boy/girl, but I found him extremely relatable. Like Cesar I felt compelled to do certain things without knowing why and I also worried that my parents were secretly monsters and watched for signs of madness, concerned that they planned to take my sister and me out into the woods and kill us (they would probably be horrified if they knew this).

This book is profoundly weird, it jumps all over the place with no apparent plot, and some of the writing is flowery while some is very straight-forward. It's not something I care to read in large doses, but I'm glad I found it. (less)

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May 08, 2011 jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: translation, fiction

one of the more striking characteristics of césar aira's fiction is how much fun it seems he must be having while writing his stories. not limited by the constraint of genre, aira's novellas often move effortlessly between them, without ever an inkling of it seeming forced or contrived. despite their relative brevity, aira's works (though i am unable as yet to determine just how) have an enduring effect far greater than books i thought i enjoyed more than his. this lasting mark may well be testa...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: argentine

The first two chapters are absolutely excruciating to read: incredibly well managed, funny, weird, tense, well conceived, and utterly bizarre. The narrator is a boy, but then again, he might be a girl: that's strange enough, because the ambiguity is managed offhandedly -- someone refers to the protagonist as "he," and someone else as "she." (The offhandedness of references to gender outdoes Yann Martel's attempt at the same insouciance.) The child is offered a strawberry ice cream. It's a specia...more The first two chapters are absolutely excruciating to read: incredibly well managed, funny, weird, tense, well conceived, and utterly bizarre. The narrator is a boy, but then again, he might be a girl: that's strange enough, because the ambiguity is managed offhandedly -- someone refers to the protagonist as "he," and someone else as "she." (The offhandedness of references to gender outdoes Yann Martel's attempt at the same insouciance.) The child is offered a strawberry ice cream. It's a special treat, because he, or she, has never had ice cream. He, or she, nearly gags on it, and Aira's description is intense and nauseating. And then -- this is only a "spoiler" for chapter 2, not for the rest of the book (and the information is available in published reviews) -- the father flies into a rage and kills the ice-cream vendor. [return][return]After that utterly unique start the book unravels, or rather, Aira relaxes into a sequence of set-pieces that could have been independent short stories. It's a Bildungsroman, and you follow the little girl, or boy, through various adventures to an ending that aspires to be as willfully strange as the opening. [return][return]I'd argue that the problem here is the lingering pernicious influence of magic realism. This isn't magic realism, because nothing is supernatural, and it's programmatically unromantic and unsentimental. But it's determinedly quirky and persistently exaggeratedly eccentric, and those traits, I think, are leftovers -- echoes -- of the little frissons and surrealist pleasures of magic realism. [return][return]Aira is a stupendously talented storyteller, and I intend to read everything of his that is translated. On this case, the form is episodic for no clear reason (why not a more linear narrative, when Aira shows he's a master of it in the first two chapters?), and the eccentricities are artificially concocted. (It's amazing that Bola�o liked him, because they are so different -- that makes me rethink Bola�o.) It will be interesting to see if his other books have different strengths, or if he is caught in a structureless collages of short-form set pieces.(less)

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Feb 11, 2012 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, novella

Great beginning, pretty good ending, much of the middle felt like muddle, but it was short enough that it wasn't a fatal detraction.

The narrator is a young boy or a young girl--the book keeps shifting as to which it is, with no logic that I could discern--who is born in the provinces around Buenos Aires in the 1930s. The book begins with his/her first taste of ice cream, which is tainted with food poisoning. A poignant scene of the father not understanding why he/she does not like the ice cream...more

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Aug 03, 2009 Amanda rated it 3 of 5 stars

An odd story from the point of view of an odd child in Argentina. It begins with the child being poisoned and their father imprisoned for murder. Little Cesar gets through the stay at the hospital in a most cerebral manner. Each day is game and adventure in Cesar's head. The child is considered retarded by many, probably because she/he rarely speaks or interacts with anyone.

*spoiler review follows*
Many reviews have begun with the oddity of the protagonist's gender - as they refer to themself as...more

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Aug 20, 2010 Alex V. rated it 4 of 5 stars

From my blog.

I started and finished Nun in the course of waiting for, catching, and being carried home on the bus yesterday afternoon. It is one of those magic novellas whose beguiling strangeness is akin to watching a match flare up, burn out, and smolder. I missed the part about the nun if it is actually in there, and found the floating gender identity of the narrator a little confusing, but its opening chapter about the promise of ice cream resulting in a murder and a lifetime of bewilderment...more

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Oct 23, 2012 Ursula rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

3.5/5 This book opened with a killer premise and the first chapter was riveting. The last chapter was riveting as well, but chapters 3-9 were mostly a drag. I appreciated the ambiguous gender of the narrator but found her/his character/nature intolerable. This is actually the only first person novel I have found to be solipsistically smothering-- that's the only way I can accurately describe the bulk of the book. I didn't care to know every single nonsensical thought running through this narrato...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Ben Loory rated it 2 of 5 stars

heard about aira through an article in the los angeles review of books talking about writers who write straight through without rewriting... i mean without EVER rewriting... like, as an actual decided technique... sounds insane to me, but apparently people do this? javier marias, jesse ball (i think?), and this guy, aira... the article cited aira as working very very slowly, only producing a page or so a day... which, okay, sounds like maybe you could do it... in any case, seemed interesting to...more

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Feb 04, 2012 Aaron Broadwell rated it 5 of 5 stars

This one of the strangest and most remarkable things I have read in a long time. Narrated in the first person by either a six-year old boy or girl, the story begins with a poisoning. The rest of the short book is the very odd six-year old perspective of the child in the story, where fact and fiction merge in some puzzling way. It is a bit like walking through a carnival hall of mirrors, looking at each image of the narrator, wondering -- is this who s/he really is, or is this another distortion?...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Kathryn rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you're looking for something about nuns, don't read this book. This book is fantastic and original, but if you're looking for nun material, go for Lying Awake or, (for nonfiction nuns) Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics.

If you're looking for something short, original, and fantastic. Then read this. It's one of a kind.

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Feb 09, 2012 Mike Puma rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: argentine-author, new-directions-publishing, 2012

One likely to piss off some readers. It needn't. It will, it has, but it needn’t.

A precocious little girl (boy), César Aira—not the author, César Aira, or the César Aira who narrates The Literary Conference, but a fictional César Aira who will likely narrate other books by César Aira—recounts the traumatic event which begins her life in a new city before she (he) becomes increasingly distanced from the reality that others participate in. A little mind-fuck of a book given that she (he) narrates

...more

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May 10, 2009 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the weirdest book I've ever read in my life. I can definitely see why the Bolaño rave is on the front cover. The back cover summarizes the book as "a modern day 'Through the Looking Glass,' that begins in cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream." That's probably about as good as a summary you're going to get. It's also important to mention that although the main character has the same name as the author, it's never clear whether the narrator is male or female (she appears as a...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Linda rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't even know where to start....I thought the title "How I Became a Nun" was interesting, considering that the author is a man. And the bookseller said it's being used in lots of classes in Boston, so I thought I'd give it a try. Plus, it's a short one, and I'm so very busy.

Not only is there anything to clue you into the choice of title, but there's a completely unexplained shift in the main character's gender. The narrator uses the feminine form of adjectives to refer to him/herself the maj...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Akira Watts rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is now the third book of Aira's that I've read and, while different in every way the from prior two, I can see a bit of a pattern emerging. The story veers and lurches. It swerves from realism to surrealism and back. A large number of things make little sense. And the ending is both inexplicable and inevitable.

All in all, I quite liked this book. Reading it is much like being in the state of delirium that the narrator experiences in the second chapter, and has left me in a state of lovely d...more

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Jul 22, 2012 Kim rated it 1 of 5 stars

Perhaps I read Aira too literally. Certainly had an impact and I appreciated his style but I could not deal with his content.

Parts that stuck with me (beyond the haunting storyline):

"The drama started later on...Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already." (46)

"Love was the theme of the serial and everyone was in love." "The tangle was so dense, it created a new simplicity of compactness. Space was no longer empty, porous and intangible; it had b...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Elizabeth Pyjov rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: latin-american-lit

I didn't connect with the writing style, it's very particular and somehow only glides around the surface, even when talking about insanity and psychological moments which are great topics for thoughtful, meaningful writing.

It's not intelligent enough to be worth it but also not funny enough to be worth it.

Still, there were some cutesy/fun/silly phrases:

"Por algo dicen: lo barato sale caro."

''Yo iba bien predispuesta. Adoraba a mi papá. Veneraba todo lo que viniera de él.'' (I think I remember so...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Barbara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-fiction, book-club

I reread this book and still like it as much as I did the first time around. It's packed with quirky, intelligent ideas. The story centers on the internal musings of a six year old child, Cesar, who is exposed to cyanide poisoning at the beginning of the story. Her life seems like it is on loan from there, as the story builds towards its inevitable conclusion. Or not? You have to question everything in this book, because it is difficult to distinguish between the child's internal and external li...more

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May 05, 2010 Matthew Balliro rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

I'm three books into Aira's oeuvre (sadly, only 5 books have been translated into English; hopefully more are on the way) and I think I'm well on my way to getting a hold of his pacing, language, and humorous yet realistic portrayal of the fantastic (if that makes any sense). He's Argentinian so of course you're going to find Borges in his work even if it's not there, but if you focus on that you're missing the point. Aira's books are tremendously human, and what's at stake in them are the lives...more

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May 12, 2010 Tait rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: latin-american, literature, school

Cesar Aira, the child narrator of Cesar Aira's whimsical and weird How I Became a Nun, claims she is the master of the hallucinatory style, a fact that immediately becomes clear when the confusion arises over whether the character is a girl like she describes herself or a boy like all the adult characters describe her. Be warned, this is not a mistranslation like many reviews seem to think, nor a convoluted autobiography despite the parallel of author and character's name. Instead these are a wi...more

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Jul 14, 2010 Jimmy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: argentina, male, novel, year-1990s

"Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it"

Certainly he is becoming one of my favorite writers. Certainly he writes two books which I have read thus far, both unlike each other and unlike anything else I've read, this one telling the story of a childhood, of a girl who is sometimes the author himself (a man), resembling a child's point of view that is obviously too grown up to be a true child's view. The author himself who is one of my favorites now because his writing tracks the dirt at the opening of 'reading' so that grooves have already formed where he plays with his little ideas. 'Plays' is the right word because he is a true tinkler, playing with philosophy rather than philosophizing, rather than explaining. What is remarkable is that his novels are not exercises in idea-making, there is no central idea either, it is a rather unfocused affair where each idea rises and falls and is soon forgotten; they are rather like a child's toys laid out on the floor so as to take up as much space. Things are askew just enough to be weird, but not weird enough to be unrealistic, so that you are constantly unsure: in fact Aira is one of the few who can write prose that is both absolutely crazy/wild/experimental and yet completely conforming to 'realism'. His characters are complex, not just a ghost summoned by ideas, but quirky untidy actual people, and his ideas are untidy too, and existing in a sort of believable reality. Also, Aira never falls into cliche. He fills his book with mysteries and inconsistencies, one here, a little thing off there, none of which are actual mistakes. Aira is truly one of the best writers today, and is criminally under-read.

The beginning and end of the story are the worst parts. There he seems intent to make a "story" of it, whereas the middle of the story goes nowhere and is where the story flourishes with little details and thoughts inside the character's head which are the true pleasure of Aira. But even the beginning and end are captivating, in that he is being conventional and tidy and strange in this labored way that becomes almost ridiculous and unrealistic.

"You have to watch out for vipers, tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse. Watch out for Aira! Don't go near him! Don't talk to him! Don't look at him! Pretend he doesn't exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno idea." p. 57

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Dec 08, 2010 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars

I gave this 3 stars at first but have changed it to 5 on reassessment. This testifies to tastes changing over time, even as brief as a year. When I first read How I Became a Nun, I came in with far too much 'Literature' in mind and a lot less 'Art'. Guess I'm old fashioned that way. But I recently arrived at a comparison of Aira's novellas to Duchamp's combines and suddenly it made perfect sense. There's no reason to Aira's stories, except as material evidence of a creative act that has appealin...more

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Mar 27, 2008 Jesse rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

the book is pleasing on different levels of appreciation.
first, the author does better than any other since Bruno Schultz in representing a child narrator, employing literary language that is clearly "adult" to reconstruct the hallucinatory imagery of a child's imagination. so the prose is pleasing in itself, as in the narrator's description of radio dramas she listened to:

Era un radioteatro de amor, y todos amaban. Como pequeñnas moléculas, todos extendían sus valencias de amor en el espacio, e...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Mark rated it 3 of 5 stars

a short novel, progressing episodes in the short life of a confused and difficult child in argentina. the strange etiquette of being a child, the flaws and impossibilities of communication, and the complexity of interior life. there are some unresolved challenges in the story (the switching gender of the narrator, the unexplained title), and some episodes of surprising violence and mean spirit, but for the most part i found the story full of humor and strange insight. also, strawberry ice cream....more

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Jan 16, 2012 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: argentina, literature-in-translation

Maybe 4.5. The narrative was confusing at times (for one thing, we're not sure if the narrator is a boy or a girl), but in this book, confusion is very much the point. Aira's style is one that can easily teeter into the overly abstract, and How I Became a Nun is no exception; however, given the narrator's age and condition, it works in this piece. Better, or in a more coherent way, than in Ghosts, for example (in my opinion.) In any case, the uncertainty and murkiness of the narrative add to, ra...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Amélie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, argentine

...bon, ben on pourra pas dire que j'ai pas essayé d'aimer César Aira. Celui-ci m'a déjà fait sentir un peu moins stupide que Un épisode dans la vie du peintre voyageur, mais SEIGNEUR. Des pages & des pages de texte... avec vraiment trop... de points de suspension... Je crois qu'il y a rien au monde qui me donne plus envie de pitcher un livre au bout de mes bras.

(Mais trois étoiles parce que c'est un petit récit complètement déjanté qui se lit assez bien, quand même.)

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About César Aira

César Aira (born on February 23, 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Argentine contemporary literature, in spite of his limited public recognition.

He has published over fifty books of stories, novels and essays. Indeed, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of...more César Aira (born on February 23, 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Argentine contemporary literature, in spite of his limited public recognition.

He has published over fifty books of stories, novels and essays. Indeed, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of writing and publication –two to four novella-length books each year.[1]

Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a “flight forward” (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the “continuum” (el continuo) of a constant movement forward in the fictional narrative. As a result his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and “subliterary” genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas; on the other hand, he frequently deliberately refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended.

While his subject matter ranges from Surrealist or Dadaist quasi-nonsense to fantastic tales set in his Buenos Aires neighborhood in Flores, Aira also returns frequently to Argentina’s nineteenth century (the two books translated into English, The Hare and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, are examples of this; so is the best-known novel of his early years, "Ema la cautiva" (Emma, the Captive)). He also returns regularly to play with stereotypes of an exotic East ("Una novela china", A Chinese Novel); "El volante" (The Flyer), and "El pequeño monje budista" (The Little Buddhist Monk)). Aira also enjoys mocking himself and his childhood home town Coronel Pringles in fictions such as "Cómo me hice monja" (How I Became a Nun), "Cómo me reí" (How I Laughed), “El cerebro musical” (The Musical Brain) and "Las curas milagrosas del doctor Aira" (The Miraculous Cures of Dr. Aira). His novella La prueba (1992) served as the basis --or point of departure; only the first half-hour follows the novella-- of Diego Lerman's film Tan de repente (Suddenly) (2002). His novel "Cómo me hice monja" (How I Became a Nun) was selected as one of the best 10 publications in Spain in the year 1998.

Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas [The Three Dates], arguing for the central importance, when approaching some minor eccentric writers, of examining the moment of their lives about which they are writing , the date of completion of the work, and the date of publication of the work. Aira also was the literary executor of the complete works of his friend the scabrous poet-novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–1985).

The American publisher, New Directions, has put out four of his works in English translation (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became A Nun, Ghosts, The Literary Conference). New Directions plans to publish more works of Aira's in the near future.

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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

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