Review by New York Times Review
RIGHT now a novel's length seems a neutral force. Over here, you have Haruki Murakami and Peter Nadas lying silent for years, then storming the shores of consciousness with thousandpage dreadnoughts; over there, the Argentine writer César Aira, pumping out books of one-tenth the size that can still put knots in your brain. Since 1975 he has published more than 80 of them in Spanish, according to his publisher. "Varamo" is the seventh to be translated into English, and the sixth since 2006 by New Directions. It concerns an afternoon and evening in the life of a middle-aged civil-service flunky by that name. The setting is Colón, the Panamanian city by the Caribbean mouth of the canal; it's 1923, nine years after the canal's completion. Here's the plot, which is both allimportant and beside the point. One day, before going home to the house he shares with his Chinese-born mother, Varamo is paid his monthly salary in counterfeit money. Instantly recognizing the problem, he is paralyzed with the fear that he will be turned in for possessing illegal tender. Facing a month of starvation, he takes comfort in his hobby: embalming. His current project is a fish playing the piano. His mother cooks the fish for their dinner, even though he has applied to it tartaric acid, carpenter's glue, brilliantine and vitriol. After dinner Varamo makes his habitual short walk to the local cafe, and as usual he hears voices uttering unintelligible codes and formulas. On the way, he witnesses a car crash involving the nation's treasurer. During a tense interlude at the home of the driver's girlfriend, where a doctor works to revive the treasurer, he takes part in conversations about conspiracies and black-market golf clubs. He is given a written copy of the strange codes and formulas that his voices have been reciting: it takes too long to explain here, but the codes have to do with the golf clubs, and he's been hearing them thanks to a wax-cylinder phonograph near an open window. Finally arriving at his destination - "ahead of him, at the end of the street, the cafe shone like a carbuncle" - Varamo meets three book publishers. (It seems Colón has become a hub of international black-market fiction.) The pirate editors, eager to expand their catalogs with all kinds of ephemera, persuade Varamo to write a book about embalming, and offer him as an advance the exact sum of his monthly salary. He goes home and more or less invents a new style of literature, transcribing the codes, as well as everything else we've seen him put in his pocket since the end of his workday, in random order and in lines of irregular length. The manuscript is published and becomes the "celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry," ridiculously called "The Song of the Virgin Child." The book you are reading, as you come to learn during a stretch in the middle when the academic-sounding narrator inserts himself, is not "The Song of the Virgin Child" - that would be too easy for Aira - but a literary history, a reconstruction of Varamo's day based on information teased out of the poem. "Although this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of literary history, not a fiction," says the narrator, who further explains why the perfectly novelistic "free indirect style" used therein is a valid nonfiction form, given the circumstances. One quickly learns, in reading about Aira, that he does not revise. In interviews he talks about "fuga hacia adelante" - the "flight forward." And so his books are often like elaborate bedtime or campfire stories in which the narrator works through the progressive decisions of ordinary characters but stretches the reader's trust all the time. (He rationalizes backward: he'll conjure a treasurer in Colón, then make his characters speculate idly about why there are government ministries in a noncapital city.) "Varamo," like all the Aira books in translation, is charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular visions; they're filled with invented games, preposterous theories delivered in reasonable tones, portentous subplots that later appear to have no importance and metafictional shifts only partly rewarding the attention they demand. Relationships are wooden and dialogue is farcical. But there is something modestly cool going on underneath here, something to do with content following form. Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention, invention as improvisation and improvisation as transgression, as getting away with something - as anyone might be who essentially writes stories in real time. Thoughts about improvisation, as fancy and as dread, pervade the book. In a creative moment at home, Varamo considers grafting frogs' arms onto his embalmed fish; in a panicky moment a few pages later, he worries about how to properly feign innocence while holding counterfeit bills; and of course the entire novel is itself an improvisation, though the harrumphing narrator proclaims (in the smugly reassuring tone of the animal-safety messages that appear after some movies) that "no invention has been required to recount the process of inspiration as a straightforward narrative." And what about those counterfeit bills and those pirated books? They're symbols of the same preoccupation with the improvised versus the certified. In the end, "Varamo," like its main character, writes its own ticket. Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The Times and the author of "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 18, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Argentinian writer Aira (How I Became a Nun, English translation 2007) is a prolific writer of brief books that are carefully designed to thwart the efforts of those who might explain or interpret them. His latest tells the story of one Varamo, a Panamanian government clerk (and amateur taxidermist) whose life turns chaotic when he receives his monthly salary in counterfeit bills. To assuage his anxiety, Varamo takes a walk, which leads to a series of surreal coincidences and other events of allegorical or metafictional significance, which eventually result in Varamo uncovering a pirate publishing ring and authoring The Song of the Virgin Boy, the most famous poem in all of Central America (as well as solving his money problems). Though it may be tempting to take this as simply weightless literary frivolity as, at times, Aira seems to be daring us to do there is, among all the deliberately destabilizing absurdity and the frequent authorial asides, a certain reverence for novelty, chance, and risk-taking as necessary catalysts for the creative process.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Aira, author of more than 80 published books, returns with another slim story, this one about an ineffectual government clerk who, after wandering around 1923 Colon, Panama all night, sits down and in one fell swoop writes the most famous poem in the modern Central American canon. But Aira is less concerned with the result than he is with the events immediately leading up to its composition: an attempt to embalm a fish; a conversation with two reclusive sisters who live in the neighborhood; a "regularity rally," or race in which the winner is the driver who deviates least from a predetermined speed between start and finish. The book is structured around a series of chance encounters, while also giving Aira some asides on broader concepts like the nature of perception, the promises of narrative form, and human thought. We never get to read Varamo's great poem, and the story might strike some as dilatory and unfocused, but others will relish Aira's language ("The stars were an overwhelming surprise") and the simplicity of his set pieces, one of which serves as the book's last image and involves birds gently pecking at a small red candy stuck on the branches of a bush. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Varamo, a fiftyish Panamanian bachelor civil servant, has just been paid 200 pesos in counterfeit currency and doesn't know what to do about it. So he wanders through the city of Colon, encountering numerous eccentrics, until he runs into three publishers in a cafe who urge him to write a book on his hobby, taxidermy. With no previous writing experience, he pens a poem, "The Song of the Virgin Boy," which ends up becoming one of the most celebrated masterpieces of Central American poetry. Instead of dealing with embalming, however, the poem is a re-creation of the events that happened earlier that day, pieced together from notes, an ironic apology of the writing craft. VERDICT This delectable novella by prolific Argentine author Aira constantly pulls the reader's leg, heightening the absurdity in a playful, desultory style reminiscent of magic realism. At about the novel's midpoint, the author directly intervenes by discussing his theory of narratology, the fruit of which he claims is in the reader's hand. For those who like writing in the vein of Garcia Marquez and other masters of 20th-century Latin American literature.-Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
