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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

César Aira,

Chris Andrews (Translator),

Roberto Bolaño (Preface by)

3.91 · Rating details · 2,771 ratings · 310 reviews

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the ...more

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Paperback, 88 pages

Published May 25th 2006 by New Directions (first published 2000)

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Mar 27, 2013 s.penkevich rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: The artist in you

Recommended to s.penkevich by: Stephen P

Shelves: art, novella

‘It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams”.’

In order to achieve the depth of soul and vision necessary to become a true artist, Rainer Maria Rilke prescribes a life of solitude. However, this exchange of artistry for solitude may come at a very high price. While on a journey through Argentina to paint landscapes, German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas suffered a tragic accident that left him with an horrifical ‘It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams”.’

In order to achieve the depth of soul and vision necessary to become a true artist, Rainer Maria Rilke prescribes a life of solitude. However, this exchange of artistry for solitude may come at a very high price. While on a journey through Argentina to paint landscapes, German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas suffered a tragic accident that left him with an horrifically maimed face and damaged nervous system. As his disfigurement and bouts of pain separate him from his companions, pushing him inward towards his own solitude, his new morphine fueled vision unlocks the inner beauty of the world and pushed him further into an elevated artistic spirit. ‘It was as if he had taken another step into the world of his paintings.’ César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is a succinct allegory of an artists solitude and place in the wide world, as Aira’s compact prose illustrates a grand portrait of artistic history and the delicate balance of existence.

Landscape by Rugendas

Aira is so precise, so exacting with his language, that this succinct novella retains the broad scope of a lengthy novel. In 80pgs, Aira covers a story and a deep well of ideas that could easily have been discussed for hundreds of pages, yet, the reader does not feel that Aira has slighted them with his brief, but powerfully moving, book. Every word hangs perfectly in balance, not a word out of place, which is impressively fitting with many of Rugendas and his companion’s investigation of balance in the world. Although Episode finds its roots in factual biography, this is, for all intensive purposes, a fictionalized account of Rugendas, however, like the way Rugendas’ hallucinations blend with reality, the blend of fact and fiction opens up the inner beauty of life and art that is impenetrable to fact and common reality.

’And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness.’

To further embody this sentiment, Aira crafts his fictional account to resemble a biographic novel, writing as if citing letters that don’t actually exist and interspersing encyclopedic asides of biographical information. This seemingly factual information grows in the soil of fiction to become something far greater. ‘Reality was becoming immediate, like a novel.’

Having studied in the genre of physiognomy of nature, a scientific approach to landscape painting laid out by the ideas of Alexander von Humboldt, Rugendas reproduced exactly species to create a perfect, scientific totality.

‘[Rugendas'] aim was to apprehend the world in its totality; and the way to do this, he believed, in conformity with a long tradition, was through vision…The artistic geographer had to capture the “physiognomy” of the landscape by picking out its characteristic “physiognomic” traits…The precise arrangement of physiognomic elements in the picture would speak volumes to the observer’s sensibility, conveying information not in the form of isolated features but features systematically interrelated so as to be intuitively grasped…The key to it all was “natural growth,” which is why the vegetable element occupied the foreground…’

The artistic style has him reproduce exact, scientific elements in each painting to maintain an accurate image of reality, to highlight a specific moment in fluid history. As he reproduces small details of flowers to better capture the whole of a landscape, when drawing the Indian cattle raids, he comments that each toe, each tiny element of the Indians body is an expression on the whole of the man, which then must be reproduced, ‘seeing it as part of the multitudinous species, which would go on making nature. Continually reappearing from the wings, the Indians were, in their way, making history.’

History itself becomes an important motif of the novella. On their journey, each vision absorbed into them contains some statement on the history of the world, and mans mark he has made on it.

‘The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and bloodlines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability, and the sketches they had made, in so far as they had any value, stood as records of this permeation.’

While storytelling is often the method for passing down history, Rugendas argues that ‘art was more useful that discourse.’ If all the storytellers fell silent, he argues that history could be better passed down by ‘a set of “tools,” which would enable mankind to reinvent what had happened in the past, with the innocent spontaneity of action.’ Rugendas argues for repetition, that all of humanity’s actions deserve to happen again to better learn from them. The repetitions of events lead to the telling of humanity, and each individual part speaks volumes to the whole. Like the reproduction of individual flora and fauna to create an accurate landscape, each scene, like the Indian raid, is an individual piece to the larger portrait of history. ‘The scenes would be part of the larger story of the raid, which in turn was a very minor episode in the ongoing clash of civilizations.’

Aira blend of fact and fiction, with the purpose to create a poignant statement fact or fiction couldn’t achieve on it’s own, Rugendas new-found, and highly paid for, vision of the world is a blend of reality and nightmare. ‘Nature, in its nineteen vegetal phases, adapted itself to his perception, enveloped with Edenic light: a morphine landscape.’ Each of his hallucinations carry with it fragments of reality, and the two combine on paper to illustrate a truth in the world that was once hidden to him before.. Whereas he must cover himself behind a veil, the veil of reality is lifted before his eyes. ‘Rugendas had come to the conclusion that the lines of a drawing should not represent corresponding lines in visible reality, in a one-to-one equivalence. On the contrary, the line’s function was constructive.’ His surrealistic paintings embody a truth nobody else had been able to envision.

’He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares what they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is that they are.’

His new facial strangeness and ugliness opens up the beauty of strangeness in the world. Rugendas companion, Krauss, spends much time pondering the balance of the world, and with Rugendas, we see Rilke’s balance of artistry and solitude come to life in mortifying glory. The man leaves humanity all but behind to fully embody painting.

This is an incredible novella that seems like a trick of the eye must have taken place as so much knowledge is packed into such a small space. Like the best of short fiction, each word is fitted perfectly together to build a grand story — each word is like each physiognomic detail in Rugendas paintings. Aira is certainly not an author to be passed over as he is able to create such a fine balance of fact and fiction as well as beauty and grotesquery. As stated by Roberto Bolaño in the forward: ‘[Aira’s] novels seem to put the theories of Witold Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the World.’ If prayer is literature, than Aira certainly offers up some powerful prayer to the literary gods.
4/5

Cattle Raid as depicted by Rugendas

‘All these scenes were much more like pictures than reality. In pictures, the scenes can be thought out, invented, which means that they can surpass themselves in terms of strangeness, incoherence and madness. In reality, by contrast, they simply happen, without preliminary invention.’
...more

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Jul 22, 2019 Swaroop rated it really liked it

Fascinating & Magnificent!

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by CÃ©sar Aira is a beautiful and wonderful piece of literature. This is a work of fiction about and around the trips of the German master landscape painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas.

"Nature, in its nineteen vegetal phases adapted itself to his perception, enveloped with Edenic light: a morphine landscape." ...more

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May 30, 2013 Garima rated it really liked it

Recommended to Garima by: s.penkevich

Shelves: my-2-cents, short-wonders

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

The power of art can easily be compared to the marvels of nature since both contribute a great deal in understanding life. If nature reflects the beauty of life, art helps in seeing that beauty through the kaleidoscopic vision of an artist. As that vision broadens, so does the dimensions of the said beauty and we reach an epiphany, both as a creator and a
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

The power of art can easily be compared to the marvels of nature since both contribute a great deal in understanding life. If nature reflects the beauty of life, art helps in seeing that beauty through the kaleidoscopic vision of an artist. As that vision broadens, so does the dimensions of the said beauty and we reach an epiphany, both as a creator and a witness of art, where we break free of the conventions and discover new ways of presenting and finding various facets of life and subsequently come across the fact that there lies an inexplicable shred of beauty in the apparent ugliness of many things. Such discovery can be a lifelong process for some while for others, an occurrence of a single event is enough to attain a whole new perspective accompanied with a renewed confidence and strength to give shape to a dream, no matter how farfetched it appeared before.

Such an Episode occurred in the life of our Landscape Painter, Johan Moritz Rugendas. He along with his friend, Robert Krause set out on a journey to Latin America in order to paint the pristine beauty of the landscapes and to capture the physiognomy of nature. This phrase alone is worth considering the ambition, depth and uniqueness of the task undertaken by Rugendas and suggests about the difficulty involved in executing it. Artists are stubborn creatures. If they are clear about what they want to achieve and look forward for an ideal opportunity to fulfill their dreams, then nothing, almost nothing, can stop them if they find that one chance. Rugenda experienced such moment and with that this novella also elevates to a level of pure genius.

I have immense respect for short story and novella writing format. The challenge involved in carving out something captivating and yet maintaining the charm of brevity is no child’s play. Everything needs to be done within limited means and if the scope of the writing can’t get wider, it needs to be dug deeper and that’s exactly what Aira did with this book. Like other readers, this book left me fascinated with everything it packed under the guise of the label ‘novella’. Aira’s writing has the quality of being easily approachable even when he’s writing about the technical aspects about the art of painting. I never thought I would read such things and enjoy them too. The twist in events and the impeccable style in which the narrative shift is executed, clearly establishes Aira’s talent. There were numerous instances when the surrealism becomes the focus of storytelling but the sheer honesty of the teller manifested through his words were enough for me to assume surreal as nothing less than real. In short, this book satisfied me as a reader and proved that sometimes best things indeed come in small packages.

Highly recommended!
...more

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Sep 09, 2018 Mutasim Billah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: argentina

“Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.”

Johann Moritz Rugendas was a renowned German landscape painter of his time. He was particularly well-known for his work in the Americas. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, he sought financial support for an ambitious project of recording pictorially the life and nature of Latin America. In his word, it would be "an endeavor to truly become the illustrator of life in the New World". In 1831 h ...more

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Nov 05, 2010 Mike Puma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2011, new-directions-publishing, argentine-author

In a moronic attempt to get a jump on my 2111 Reading Challenge, I opted for the slimmest title on my TBR list—a novella of 87 pages that should have taken only moments from a day spent reading other people’s reviews and wishing I had more time to read the books they’ve reviewed. Speaking of other reviews, much better ones for An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter are to be found here and here. I suggest you immediately leave off this more mediocre and humdrum musing and devote your att In a moronic attempt to get a jump on my 2111 Reading Challenge, I opted for the slimmest title on my TBR list—a novella of 87 pages that should have taken only moments from a day spent reading other people’s reviews and wishing I had more time to read the books they’ve reviewed. Speaking of other reviews, much better ones for An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter are to be found here and here. I suggest you immediately leave off this more mediocre and humdrum musing and devote your attention to those.

Landscapes—aren’t they the paintings that graced the walls of hotel rooms prior to the arrival of pastel impressions that compliment the barrenness of rooms neutered in their standardization and into which they provide the only sources of color? Landscape artists? Landscape artists? It’s unthinkable. Unless, of course, one thinks of what Cormac McCarthy can do with a landscape, or Thomas Hardy, or César Aira:

Peaks of mica kept watch over their long marches. How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanoes gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence; air-shafts voluminous as oceans.

(Dammit, Jimmy beat me to the punch with that quote, but it bears repeating) Maybe there was a point behind all the references to the sublime (a Longinus-tudinal study? that can't be right) in those Lit classes of so long ago.

Now, if your indulgence persists, consider a landscape filtered through a mantilla (read the book, you’ll see why it matters). One person’s lacy mantilla is a matter of discretion and self-effacement; for another, it’s a work of needlecraft, art and display. For some, a mantilla filters what’s beyond it, for others it filters what’s concealed inside or beneath. For some, art is an imaginative creation mediating the real and the real.

Finishing this book and writing this review (such as it is) leaves me wondering—4 stars or 5? It’s not one I’d recommend whole-heartedly for any and every reader. It is one I’d recommend whole-heartedly for some readers. If you’re one who likes artists writing about art and other artists, read it. On my profile I’ve said the difference between 4 and 5 stars is that I liked a book and that I read it at the right time. I read this one at the right time, and I’m going from this to more by this author (yeah, it’s another slim volume—one of NDP’s Pearls—a series or collection that bodes well for me as I’ve yet to be disappointed in NDP).
...more

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Sep 05, 2008 brian rated it really liked it

this book is like a goddamn greek myth in its perfect symmetry and simplicity. a painter traveling through the mountains and plains of argentina is struck by lightning and turned into something of a freak. physically deformed, enlightened, twisted, destroyed, dragged down, flattened, elevated... and everything is suddenly different. the natural world itself seems less a collage of beautiful randomness than a coded mosaic... aarrrggghhh! manimals, indian raids, endless horizons, the subtle distin ...more

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Jun 01, 2011 Lee Klein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Said, a bit too loud, "Ha! Wow!" immediately after finishing its perfect ending. Not to hype it too much but maybe a new favorite short novel? It's a little like the Bartlebooth sections in Perec's Life: A User's Manual crossed with "Fitzcarraldo"? Imagine if Herzog exhumed Kinski for one last old-timey (early 1800s) South American romp . . . Seriously swell lit. Very little dialogue (no quotes; no conventional literary fiction dramatization; no character-revealing convos etc; no sections render ...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Stephen P rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, latin-american

This book is short though usually referred to as slim, at eighty eight pages. Its prose, rather than slim, deepens in ever reaching transcendental layers never revealing intention. There is no trace of crafting it down or trying to say more. The allotted pages were precisely what this story called for and where it ended. It was created in the absence of the tools of the post modern trade. Its immediacy ran the length of the novel maintaining its tightened grip to the last word.

Each of Aira's wo This book is short though usually referred to as slim, at eighty eight pages. Its prose, rather than slim, deepens in ever reaching transcendental layers never revealing intention. There is no trace of crafting it down or trying to say more. The allotted pages were precisely what this story called for and where it ended. It was created in the absence of the tools of the post modern trade. Its immediacy ran the length of the novel maintaining its tightened grip to the last word.

Each of Aira's words are important in this seamless narrative, thoughtful, crafted, quietly carrying the weight of its meaning. The story can be read with equal relevance, as in all excellent literature, in different ways. I will try to express my reading of it and not repeat reviews already written by more able goodreads reviewers.

After gasping at the sheer beauty of the landscape descriptions of lush vegetation, mountain passes, luminous skies, I watched Aira, lived with him through it, create a journey of an individual passing through the stages of art, battling through the passage into becoming an artist.

Rugenda, a disciple and friend of the landscape painter Humbolt, who himself had developed a revolutionary theory within the confines of landscape painting, began his journey with the younger German painter, Robert Krause, from Mexico to Chile and Argentina. Carrying the measurements and boundaries of civilization, the world with them they kept barometric records, estimated wind speeds with a sock of white cloth, two glass capillary tubes containing liquid graphite as an altimeter. Mercury from a thermometer suspended from a pole provided them light. Leisurely, they sought Humbolt's physiognomy of landscape, nature. Nature's perils and beauty, country dwellers and indians, their feuds and battles began the leaving of civilization behind and the entry into the wild. Rugenda's disfigurement due to a an accident propels his passage. The clear trails turn to sinuous dark pathways.They ride into the night appearing as shadows of giraffes, bats delicately brush their faces. Rugenda's disfigurement is lit by moonlight.

We descend on the trail with them, Rugenda traveling deeper into the sinews of the creative unconscious, its lurid dangers and promise of unspecified reward. I understood the risks and now let him go on without me. I watched him cover his disfigured face with a black veil, creating a pin-prick vision, an impressionist scope, as increasingly, without plan, he delves into himself, rising up, filling himself. The world seen through his eyes, through the mantissa veil, is new, disfiguring. Increasingly obsessed with work and his own vision leaving Humbolt's quadrants behind for an existence of search and discovery. Due to his disfigurement, his new vision through the eyes of his self, Rugenda is now the isolated artist removed and never able to return to his home, back into the the world he knew. Life is now created in its vivid rawness no longer requiring its veil as Aira has discarded his, to reach beyond the safety of boundaries.

The final scene is a haunted image of a lone artist removed from the world, embedded in his art as it creates itself beneath his hand. The image will be embedded within the reader and remain without any sign of receding.

...more

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Jan 21, 2016 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing

To be a landscape painter means to be present at the feast of the nature…
“Rain, sun, two whole days of impenetrable fog, night winds whistling, winds far and near, nights of blue crystal, crystals of ozone. The graph of temperature against the hours of the day was sinuous, but not unpredictable. Nor, in fact, were their visions. The mountains filed so slowly past that the mind amused itself devising constructivist games to replace them.”
And there is a human factor as well…
“His youth was almost o ...more

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Feb 24, 2009 Jeff Jackson rated it it was amazing

Hot damn! Starts out in a digressive historical mode that's reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, then seamlessly incorporates breathless action sequences and genuine grotesquerie while ruminating on the nature of art and perspective. Exquisite and surprising. Basically a perfect novella. ...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Jeremy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: spanish-language-fiction, latin-american-fiction

Holy crap, this is a masterpiece. A tiny, weird, 87 page masterpiece. Aira's portrait of Rugendas has an easy going, almost flat tone to it. Which might be why the incredible way he curls sentences about art and seeing around and through each other works so well. There is this ominous sense of space at work throughout the book, of the physical presence of the blasted, Argentinian pampas which is somehow always right in front of you, yet also delicately remote, somehow just past perception. Nearl ...more

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Sep 20, 2013 Sam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novellas

Basically my definition of a five-star novel(la?), in the sense that it seems sui generis.
Hard to be a five-star book unless you nailed something completely individual - unless you formulated your aesthetic project and then accomplished it (if such a thing is really possible, maybe unclear?)

Might be best to summarize the project first, although the end is somewhat self-destructive and insane.

The beginning essentially tricks you into thinking you're going to be reading a (somewhat Borges-ian?) p Basically my definition of a five-star novel(la?), in the sense that it seems sui generis.
Hard to be a five-star book unless you nailed something completely individual - unless you formulated your aesthetic project and then accomplished it (if such a thing is really possible, maybe unclear?)

Might be best to summarize the project first, although the end is somewhat self-destructive and insane.

The beginning essentially tricks you into thinking you're going to be reading a (somewhat Borges-ian?) pseudo-biographical investigation of a nineteenth-century German landscape painter (complete with the sort of scholarly background and well-formed particulars that constitute that form of "scholarly realism").

But as the book progresses, it slowly admits bizarre touches - loved those Indian attacks, and the horse-drawn carts that are too long and slow for reality! - that undermine the sort of reason and scientific investigation that undergird the biographical project in the first place. The main character, Rugendas, thinks he's going to the pampas to paint truly "natural" scenes - to implement some sort of artistic "process", but once he find himself on trackless terrain the gonzo elements take over, making his whole aesthetic process (mimicked by the pseudo-biographical process of the narrative) insufficient, if not totally meaningless. Credit to Aira for making this transition from a certain school of realism to the complete repudiation of any such school subtle and credible. Give him all the Nobels.

At the half point of the book lightning strikes, and the subjectivity of Rugendas gets totally scrambled.

The second half of the book essentially undoes the first half. All attempts towards reason (even on the level of the sentence) pretty much go out the window - which is remarkable, considering how successful the initial narrative was at establishing its pseudo-scientific bona fides. Instead the furious, almost demented activity of Rugendas tries in vain to establish some new kind of cosmology in the place of his destroyed aesthetics, and all kinds of wackiness ensues: Indian attacks, stockings worn as a mask to blot out the sun, complete breakdowns of perspective, space and time - heady stuff.

This might sound dry, or overly cerebral, but it isn't. It's madcap, disorienting, and delightful to read - without losing sight of the "themes" (whatever that means) established early on. A dizzying, impressive book, and maybe the most interesting 88 page book I've ever read.

Highly recommended.

...more

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Aug 08, 2009 Jimmy rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: sophie

Shelves: male, my-canon, argentina, year-2000s, novel, poc

Part fiction, part non-fiction, part poetic description, part philosophy. Aira examines the depths of history, the meaning of repetition, reproductions and its role in art, compensation, and much more, and in the context of a very specific, relatable person and his predicaments. Often zooming into an idea or description with intense precision, then moving on, this book is able to contain big ideas without sounding pretentious, or bloated. In fact, the entire book is less than 90 pages, though it ...more

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Dec 24, 2011 Tanuj Solanki rated it liked it

Shelves: argentina, latin-america, e-book

From Naturalism to Surrealism

I agree with The New Yorker when they say that Cesar Aira's prose can be 'slapdash and perfunctory,' but it is his fertility for metaphysical speculation that, for me, more than 'compensates.'

"...changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others."

One cannot miss this line as a sort of key to the novel. The painter Rugendas, his friend Kraus, and the author Aira (clearly grounded in a modern era) - the three take keep ...more

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Dec 21, 2011 Ellie rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014indchalnge, 2014groupchal

Finished An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. I still don't know what I think of it. 3 stars or 4? I gave it 3 but I have the feeling the weaknesses in me. It haunts me in the way that usually only a major text does. I have to think some more about this. Only 88 pages but really vivid images. Based on historical fact but opening it out to the imagination. I feel that somehow I'm missing the point of it, but that there is one. Very frustrating.

Based on the power of haunting me, I'm movi ...more

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Dec 22, 2020 Jolanta (knygupe) added it

Shelves: argentinean-literature, read-for-the-2nd-time, contemporary-literature, experimental-literature

Preface. The Incredible César Aira by Roberto Bolano
If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira, an Argentinean from a town in the province of Buenos Aires called Coronel Pringles, which must, I suppose, be a real place, although it could well have been imagined by its most eminent son, who has given us superlatively lucid portraits of the Mother (a verbal mystery) and the Father (a geometrical certitude), and whose position in contemporary Hispanic literatur Preface. The Incredible César Aira by Roberto Bolano
If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira, an Argentinean from a town in the province of Buenos Aires called Coronel Pringles, which must, I suppose, be a real place, although it could well have been imagined by its most eminent son, who has given us superlatively lucid portraits of the Mother (a verbal mystery) and the Father (a geometrical certitude), and whose position in contemporary Hispanic literature is equal in complexity to that of Macedonio Fernandez at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Let me start by saying that Aira has written one of the five best stories I can remember. The story, included in Juan Forns anthology Buenos Aires, is entitled "Cecil Taylor." He is also the author of four memorable novels: How I Became a Nun, in which he recounts his childhood; Ema, The Captive, in which he recounts the opulence of the pampas Indians; The Literature Conference, in which he recounts an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes; and The Crying, in which he recounts a sort of epiphany or bout of insomnia.
Naturally those are not the only novels he has written. I am told that Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas.
Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.

Tree fern from the Brazilian jungle - Johann Moritz Rugendas

Maza, bet labai talpi ir man pasirodziusi paini knygute apie...mena, meninka, grozi, bjauruma...
Vis dar pagalvoju apie ja. Skaitysiu dar kart. ...more

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Jan 22, 2015 Adina rated it liked it

Shelves: argentina, w-mwl-alternative, short

To celebrate my return to Goodreads after one week of business travel I will write my first review with pictures. I have no idea how to do it but I am willing to learn.

I am interested in Latin American fiction and was searching for a new Argentinian writer after reading Borges and Sabato. I found the book for sale in small library and decided to give the author a try. César Aira is a prolific contemporary writer and a finalist of The Man Booker International Prize 2015. One of his main themes, a ...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Ben Winch rated it really liked it

Shelves: argentine, latin-american

Could it be that the novella - not the short story - is the pre-eminent literary artform (the form most accommodating to the search for perfection)? As focused and taut (almost) as a classic short story, yet discursive and atmospheric as few stories can be, An Episode... is a good argument for the ascendance of a form that is too often overlooked in Anglo letters. Sure, it starts dryly, and for the first 10 or so pages it's so information-dense you may wonder where the art is, but soon enough (a Could it be that the novella - not the short story - is the pre-eminent literary artform (the form most accommodating to the search for perfection)? As focused and taut (almost) as a classic short story, yet discursive and atmospheric as few stories can be, An Episode... is a good argument for the ascendance of a form that is too often overlooked in Anglo letters. Sure, it starts dryly, and for the first 10 or so pages it's so information-dense you may wonder where the art is, but soon enough (as his protagonists reach the Andes) Aira's descriptive powers kick in and you realise he's hooked you:

Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.

For those who've read another novella seriously suggestive of perfection - Georg Buchner's 19th century genre-definer Lenz - the tone may seem familiar, and it's tempting to think Aira had Lenz in mind as he wrote this. In some ways, too, he supercedes that hyper-real but youthful and overwrought 'descent into madness' tale, by choosing a subject whose cataclysm is more-easily describable in three dimensions. Along with the shimmering yet exact, vivid sense of place, there are dramatic scenes here that made me shiver or laugh in exhilarated disbelief. It's entertaining, it's a ride, it's well-written and it suggests (like a good short story) a trajectory that continues after the last page.

Still, like a short story, a novella often benefits from being collected with others of its kind, and until I've read a couple more of Aira's I don't think I'll be confident that I've begun to grasp what makes him tick. (3 points to make a straight line, after all, so Roithamer.) It's not Alvaro Mutis's The Snow of the Admiral, but then that was a novella so good that when it was collected with others they all paled in comparison. It's not Metamorphosis or The Old Man and the Sea, but they were one-offs, never to be repeated. If Aira really has 80 of these little books then, maybe, he's some kind of a discovery. But that would also explain why this book doesn't quite feel 'singular', but like another episode in the development of a writer of novellas.

My advice? Read it, before you've had a chance to read too much about it. I liked it; time will tell whether I love it.
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Dec 28, 2012 Laura Leaney rated it it was amazing

This is such a tiny gem. Exactly 88 pages of lovely prose. On the surface, the story is about Johann Moritz Rugendas, a nineteenth century landscape painter and what happened to him during his foray into Argentina to paint the landscape. More specifically, to paint the landscape by seeing "the processes of growth operative in all forms of life." If you've ever studied 19th century landscape painting, you know what this looks like. Here's a description of the landscape that Rugendas saw, accordin ...more

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Aug 11, 2014 Cody rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-plains, visual-art, latin-america, favorites, travel

Isn’t art simply mediation? A negotiation between artist, medium, and subject, often the goal is to shrink the distance between representation and represented. But can this gap ever be fully brought to a close? César Aira seems to think not, referring to this inherent and inevitable disconnect as an abyss.

If abyss sounds daunting, it is, though Aira insists that this is no cause for worry. In fact, it’s these very chasms that art is charged with bridging. When successful, divisions become blurr ...more

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Jan 01, 2017 Laysee rated it liked it

New Year’s Day 2017. I made acquaintance with my first Argentine writer, César Aira. In this tightly written story, Aira cleverly wove fiction with fact while documenting a brief period in the life of the well-known German landscape painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802 – 1858).

Rugendas was a genre painter. His genre was the physiognomy of nature, based on a procedure invented by one of his teachers, Alexander von Humboldt, who was a great naturalist painter. A physiognomic representation of nat
New Year’s Day 2017. I made acquaintance with my first Argentine writer, César Aira. In this tightly written story, Aira cleverly wove fiction with fact while documenting a brief period in the life of the well-known German landscape painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802 – 1858).

Rugendas was a genre painter. His genre was the physiognomy of nature, based on a procedure invented by one of his teachers, Alexander von Humboldt, who was a great naturalist painter. A physiognomic representation of nature was intended to apprehend the world in its totality and to provide an aesthetic understanding of the world. Aira recorded Rugenda’s 1837 trip to Argentina, and recounted “a strange episode that would mark a turning point in his life”.

On that fateful trip, Rugendas met with a horrific accident while seeking to immortalize the Argentinian pampas. Flung off his horse in a severe thunderstorm, he sustained severe injuries to his head which left his face brutally disfigured. The description of raw facial nerves being exposed and the neurological complications that ensued was medically accurate. Krause, his fellow artist friend and companion, “shuddered to think how fragile a face was. One blow and it was broken forever, like a porcelain vase." Despite excruciating pain, Rugendas continued to draw; his skill undiminished. "It was another proof of art's indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the "bridge of dreams". In an ironically compensatory fashion, following the loss of a normal-looking face, Rugendas became even more finely attuned to nature and sensitive to the beauty he was capturing in his sketches and paintings (perhaps on account of the copious amount of morphine used as treatment for unearthly pain).

How I wish I had knowledge of art to do justice to Aira’s discussion on Rugenda’s art form. I imagine an artist or art historian will find Aira's book illuminating and fascinating. What I took away was Rugenda’s indomitable courage and commitment to art, which I found very touching and admirable. This is my first Aira and I look forward to reading more of his writing.
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May 31, 2013 Tony rated it liked it

Shelves: argentinian, art

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it really liked it

Shelves: argentine

A stupendous novel, a real achievement in a very brief compass. Aira is a strange and somewhat scattered novelist -- his method guarantees he relinquishes control over his forms, and sometimes, as in "How I Became a Nun," he helps his narrative become less linear -- but his pace, his wit, his descriptions, and even his philosophic asides are tremendous. He is genuinely surprising. It's not just the plot twists that took me by surprise, it was individual descriptions and sudden parenthetical comm ...more

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Jul 22, 2011 jeremy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: translation, fiction

césar aira's stories tend to be deeply imaginative and magnificently composed, and so it is with an episode in the life of a landscape painter. the prolific argentinian writer seems to draw from an almost limitless well of creativity, as each of his works features a distinctive plot and narrative arc. based on the life of german artist johann moritz rugendas, episode recounts the painter's time on the argentine pampas, blurring the division between fact and fiction. as in most of his short works ...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Michael Flick rated it it was ok

This is the second Aira book I've read today (the first was his "The Literary Conference"). He is consistent: except for the absence of humor, it boils down to the same book (not that repetition is a fault--it's even a theme here). It appears to have been written in one day (November 24, 1995), takes about 2 hours to read leisurely and with contemplation, and is the result of the author letting his thoughts amble along in writing that one day until evening, when he declared it a book and was don ...more

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May 20, 2014 Josh Friedlander rated it really liked it

Shelves: art-aesthetics-culture

I have no idea how much of this is surreal, metaphysically inflected short novel is true, but it's gripping and superbly composed throughout. The tale of an artist's compulsive search for beautiful scenery, under, ahem, less than favourable conditions, it works around themes of artistic sincerity and the nature of reality.

Much more than anything I've read in a long time, Aira's writing gave me a sense of location: the locust-devoured pampas, steaming jungle, violet mountains populated with a hu ...more

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Dec 14, 2012 M. Sarki rated it liked it

Recommended to M. by: the goodreads readers bunch

Three stars means "I liked it" so I guess that is good enough for me. Though my measly rating looks bad among all these five stars I see around me. The book was very easy to read and I liked some of the words the translator chose to use. More on this later. But I wasn't all that moved by the monstrous other-worldly trip-off in the spirit-quest for art, or for its sake. I will expound later when I have had more time to run this reading through my mind's-eye filter. Or if the text somehow finds it ...more

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Jul 18, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it really liked it

Shelves: illustrated-review, history, place-portraits, art, latin-america

An Encounter with the Infinite

This very short 1996 novella by Argentinian writer César Aira is easy and enjoyable to read but hard to figure out afterwards. I am left asking "What on earth was that all about?" and far from confident that any of my tentative answers make any sense at all.

It is a historical novel based, so far as I can see, on documented fact. In 1837, the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, already famous from his previous paintings of Brazil, crossed the Andes from Chile, hea An Encounter with the Infinite

This very short 1996 novella by Argentinian writer César Aira is easy and enjoyable to read but hard to figure out afterwards. I am left asking "What on earth was that all about?" and far from confident that any of my tentative answers make any sense at all.

It is a historical novel based, so far as I can see, on documented fact. In 1837, the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, already famous from his previous paintings of Brazil, crossed the Andes from Chile, heading eastwards towards Buenos Aires. That great city, however, was not his principal goal; he was most interested in experiencing the dead center of the vast Argentinian pampas, with unbroken plains reaching to a flat horizon on all sides. Accompanied by younger German artist Robert Krause, Rugendas sets off in late December, taking time to draw and paint the striking mountain scenery around Aconcagua, and spending the early weeks of 1838 in Mendoza, on the Argentinian side of the Cordillera. In due course, the two artists start their journey East, but shortly after entering the true pampas, they are caught in a cataclysmic electrical storm which changes Rugendas' life for ever—and more particularly, the nature of his vision. Retracing their steps, they end up near Mendoza once more, where Rugendas witnesses other cataclysmic events, but this time of human origin.

I am not quite certain whether Rugendas' quest is motivated by aesthetic principles or by personal ones. Aira makes much of his indebtedness to the great geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (whose own explorations in South America are treated in Daniel Kehlmann's wonderful novel Measuring the World ). Humboldt was a proponent of what he called "landscape physiognomy," in which the artist would concentrate on a limited number of features, beginning with the natural vegetation, whose growth and abundance would demonstrate the qualities that gave each place its particular identity. He urged Rugendas to concentrate on the tropics, whose vegetation was immensely more vigorous and varied. Was it in reaction against Humboldt, therefore, that Rugendas sought out the rugged mountains and barren plains?

Or was it simply a personal quest for extremes of experience of all kinds? On his first visit to Mendoza, Rugendas was disappointed not to witness an earthquake or an Indian raid. Later on, he would experience the savagery of both man and nature, almost losing his life in the process. It was no longer a matter of composing arrangements that might convey the intellectual idea of a landscape, but of grasping its extremes: both its immensity and its detail. As a former art history professor, I see some analogy with two phases of Romanticism, the picturesque giving way to the dramatic, the ideal to the specific. But it is also the story of a man so altered by a close encounter with the Infinite that, having survived, he is prepared to risk his life to collect any further experiences available to him. ...more

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Apr 26, 2016 Kyle Muntz rated it liked it

Something in the tone of the introduction of this novel, where Bolano says Aira is the author "one of the five best stories" he can remember," "four memorable novels", and "one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today," was pretty amusing to me. The novel itself has a distant, very analytical approach to its narration, which verges into philosophy at quite a few points; though it only really becomes interesting around halfway through. It starts out as a meditation on humanizing ...more

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Apr 19, 2012 AC rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art, novels-spanish

What a strange, bizarre little book, like a perfect, gem-like hellenistic miniature, an engraver's sketch-pad frozen or captured alphabetically... not quite normal. ...more

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About César Aira

César Aira

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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 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.

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.
He is the father of the comic-books artist Tomás Aira.

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“This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.” — 4 likes

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