Review by New York Times Review
A CHILD RACES giddily from table to table in a crowded café, accepting objects fashioned by the patrons from paper napkins for her amusement. All are lovingly devised and impossibly elaborate: a plane, a bouquet of flowers, a diorama, a kangaroo with a movable tail, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a clown made of "paper so fragile a gaze could tear it." As each fantasy falls apart in her eager little hands, it is discarded in favor of the next. The concentrated creative aura enveloping the patrons serves as a mere backdrop for her energetic engagement with the moment that keeps turning into the next moment. This story, "In the Café," appears early in the Argentine writer César Aira's new collection, "The Musical Brain: And Other Stories," and offers a playful example of Aira's connection with how an innocent operates. He ventures into his chosen café and commits his observations to paper, then swiftly discards the handwritten page. He is at once the patron fabricating delicacies and the child moving back and forth in the stream of what he calls the perpetual present. "The immediate absorption of reality, which mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day," Aira writes in the opening story, and it's a skill he possesses himself. "I can go on inventing indefinitely," he has said, embracing the incomprehensible with such compassionate delight that the incomprehensible begins to comprehend itself. Aira's cubist eye sees from every angle. Again and again in these stories he confronts the classic mathematical challenge known as the paper-folding problem, which suggests a piece of paper can be folded in half only nine times. Not bound by the practical limits of this folding sequence, Aira envisions another algebraic possibility. In "Picasso," an O. Henry-style tale, he not only paints a picture of who Picasso was and his place in art history, he also provides a majestically perceptive description of an imagined work of art: "The queen, composed of so many intersecting planes she seemed to have been extracted from a pack of cards folded a hundred times over, refuting the proven truth that nine is the maximum amount of times a piece of paper can be folded in half." The stories in "The Musical Brain" exhibit the continuing narration of Aira's improvisational mind. His characters - whether comic-strip ruffians, apes, subatomic particles or a version of his boyhood self - enter a shifting and tilting landscape of events that unhinge our temporal existence and render it phantas-magorical yet seemingly everyday in the unfolding. His matter-of-fact approach, accepting even the most outlandish episodes, suspends disbelief and encourages one's own sense of displacement, of being released from the commonplace. Aira has pursued this manipulation of the ordinary into the extraordinary through at least 80 small books, of which only a fraction have been translated. I came to him through Roberto Bolaño, one of his champions, and was quickly seduced by three novels in particular: "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter"; "Shantytown"; and "The Seamstress and the Wind," which takes place in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, Aira's hometown. It figures he'd come from a place called Pringles, where funny music resounds and nothing ever happens, except everything. The opening line of this collection leads us unsuspectingly into Aira's wondrously fractured world: "As a kid, in Pringles, I went to the movies a lot." And so we enter a movie theater with multiple screens projecting other screens bending time, unraveling geometric memory and exposing the secret games of childhood. No one pyramids hysteria like Aira, escalating the most banal event into a human stampede. In the title story, also set in Pringles, a casual stroll after a family dinner takes an unexpected turn into a bizarre parallel world. There is a Felliniesque circus; twin dwarves in matching black suits found murdered; an ancient librarian with a beehive and pink powdered face; an egg-laying, wing-sprouting, killer chrysalis. Not to mention the musical brain itself which intermittently emits sound for an arbitrary few, like signals from a dying star. In "God's Tea Party," a subatomic particle accidentally slips into a lavish birthday ritual presided over by frenetic apes. This unwittingly imbalances the universe, escalating the frenzied behavior of the apes and sending God himself into a momentary tizzy. The infinitesimal shift results in a new level of chaos, as if a child had altered a factor in the equation of a physicist. Here and everywhere, Aira is both the physicist and the child, the being that has the audacity to emerge and the power to dissipate. BEAUTY AND DARK TRUTH flow through his work. There are political stories here, as with the chilling "Acts of Charity," which serves as a metaphor for wealthy religious institutions: Through time, a succession of priests use funds earmarked for the poor to build and maintain a so-called monument to charity and its luxuriant gardens, prioritizing aesthetic grandeur over the needs of the flock. And there are stories about the artistic process: The sadly eloquent "Cecil Taylor," for instance, voices the persistent verismo of that great jazz innovator, juxtaposed with the sublimity of his failures as he attempted to communicate a language that had yet to be scored. Taylor, the hyper-harmonic pianist preoccupied in a way that Aira understands, sought to fold the keyboard more than nine times. I once met Aira at a writer's conference in Denmark. I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard, but once I reached him all I could think to say - channeling my inner Chris Farley - was that he was awesome. Then I told him that "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter" was a masterpiece. He seemed startled, if not bemused, and insisted it was nothing more than a small history. We fell just short of a brutally passive argument, and then it started to rain. But trust me, "Landscape Painter" is a masterpiece. What does Aira know? He is only the writer. I don't normally read short stories. They often make me sad, as the characters come and go so quickly and we may never see them again. But Aira's stories seem like shards from an ever expanding interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods. He executes digression with muscular lucidity. At times I had to simultaneously speed up and slow down to follow him, but once I matched his rhythm, his thoughts seemed no more than a stone skipping across the page, expressing something I had been privately thinking but could not put into words. In this he has the perfect translator in Chris Andrews, who leap by leap seamlessly mirrors Aira's kaleidoscopic sensibilities, a symbiotic pairing. César Aira once professed a fondness for the comic-strip character Little Lulu, which makes perfect sense to me. She was the Scheherazade of the funny pages, weaving tales for her little pals sitting in rapt attention at her feet. Hail César! I can only marvel at the amount of yarn he spins in order to tell tales of his own, from the political fable to the elaborately spun joke enriched with philosophy. Aira's matter-of-fact approach encourages one's own sense of release from the commonplace. PATTI SMITH'S memoir, "Just Kids," won a National Book Award in 2010.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 15, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
This collection of 20 stunning, funny, newly translated short stories written between 1993 and 2011 embodies the best of Argentine writer Aira's quirky, philosophically reflective prose. In Picasso, a genie forces the narrator to choose whether he would prefer to possess a priceless, original painting by the Spanish artist, or to become the great master himself. The Dog takes place entirely inside a crosstown bus in Buenos Aires, as a persistent stray canine chases the narrator for several blocks, prompting a series of deeply existential inquiries. A Thousand Drops begins with a mysterious disappearance of the Mona Lisa: the canvas and frame remain, while the oil paint itself has simply vanished. The narrator of No Witnesses experiences a terrible, bizarre encounter with his Dostoyevskian double. The stories grow increasingly complex in Aira's deft handling of Borgesian plot twists and come alive with the cosmopolitan tenor of Manuel Puig. This endlessly entertaining and deliciously strange collection serves as the perfect complement to Aira's recent novels, Shantytown (2013) and The Conversations (2014).--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Aira's output has been a steady trickle of irrefutable genius and deepening strangeness, from the haunted architecture of Ghosts to delirious westerns set in the pampas of South America, such as The Hare. Now we have the first collection of Aira's stories, which might be his masterpiece. Essentially 20 novelettes, this book includes the tales "A Thousand Drops," in which the paint droplets constituting the Mona Lisa evacuate to start lives of their own, and the title story, in which Aira's hometown of Coronel Pringles, Argentina, becomes a phantasmagoria of flying dwarves. Aficionados will recognize the author's imitable modes: the philosophic wormhole (as the logic of numbers leads to the brink of absurdity in "The Infinite"), the comedy of coincidence (as in "The All that Plows Through the Nothing," which begins with an overheard conversation at a gym and ends with the death of a man who claims to have "become literature" after seeing the back of a ghost), and the gnomic furniture dramas (such as "Acts of Charity," which consists entirely of the description of a house that a priest is constructing for his successor). But there's something new, too: pieces that comment implicitly on Aira's process, which, like the great avant-garde pianist channeled in "Cecil Taylor," refuses to leave "the particular for later" and which inscrutably mingles form and narrative. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Twenty hallucinatory, open-ended short stories by Aira (Shantytown, 2013, etc.), an Argentinian master of improvisational writing.Reading Aira's work can give you the feeling of being swept up in a flash flood and carried along whether you're ready or not. It's certainly constant momentum that marks this collection of work, written over the past decade or sostories begin in the middle, spin on a dime and are often as warped as a Salvador Dal landscape. The opener, "A Brick Wall," joins stories like "The Infinite," "The Two Men" and the title tale in remembering (or dis-remembering) a childhood in Argentina but also paying testament to the enduring strangeness of a child's imagination and sometimes mocking the author's own literary reputation. "Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples. I wouldn't want anything I've written to be taken as an example," Aira writes in "The Infinite." On the flip side, "The All That Plows through the Nothing" finds the first-person narrator working out in a gym, eavesdropping on local housewives and ultimately offering a tender but also funny meditation on aging and death. "Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature," he writes. Then there are the stories that are, as they say, completely different. For instance, "God's Tea Party," in which the creator regularly celebrates his birthday with a lavish affair to which only apes are invited as "a kind of deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed at a human race that has disappointed Him." Or "A Thousand Drops," in which drops of oil paint from the Mona Lisa run off to start creative lives of their own. Or "Poverty," a love letter that anthropomorphizes the condition of being poor into a constant companion. Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but very few can write their way out of a corner better than Aira. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
