César Aira

Digesting an Aira novel is thus somewhat akin to trying to hold an eel while watching a David Lynch film on a VR headset…and if you’re willing to just lie back, giggle a bit, and enjoy the ride, then you’re in the right headspace for an Aira novel.

Aira’s short books are the literary equivalent of a Périgord black truffle — small, rich delicacies worth savoring and contemplating.

Aira’s stories seem like fragments of an infinite and interconnected universe in constant expansion.

Never tedious, always thoughtful, Aira’s prose moves with great agility and effortless depth.

A writer’s future hangs in the balance when he is tempted by an “unexpected Mephistopheles” in Aira’s playful, self-reflexive latest…the story’s driving question of choosing a meaningful course for one’s life is timeless.

Artforum, the newest work by César Aira to be published in the U.S., is one of the most fascinating experiences in modern literature. A novel that synthesizes surrealism, pseudo-memoir, philosophy, and theater into the compact space of eighty-two pages, it somehow still retains the fluttery and playful tone that makes this book so enjoyable to read.

Sui generis is really the only way to accurately describe César Aira. He’s by turns a realist, a magical realist and a surrealist — and therefore not really any of them. Anything can happen in an Aira novel, and almost everything does.

A marvelous little collection about compulsion, obsession, and the extraordinary joy that a simple pleasure can bring.

As Aira illuminates the dead ends in his drive to collect the magazine, he offers rich insight into the appreciation of art and the desire to possess. This entertaining jaunt through the writer’s creative development satisfies with brevity and grace.

Aira’s cubist eye sees from every angle.

César Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novelitas. In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of the most charming.

Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.

Aira’s cubist eye sees from every angle.

I can think of no other writer as concerned with formal and thematic questions of pace (not of time, but of the various speeds at which we feel time pacing): not only are the individual books quick-moving, but he’s published over a hundred of them, with no signs of slowing down.

The book begins with an anecdote about a conversation the author had with his wife, in which it’s revealed that he doesn’t understand what causes the phases of the moon. This revelation of ignorance quickly cascades into a series of reflections on not-knowing, and on the reciprocal relationship between the swiftness of time, which ensures that we can’t know everything, and our discontinuous experience of time, which make knowledge feel as disjointed as memory.

A gentle semi-autobiographical novel about the author’s childhood in Coronel Pringles, Argentina; the book recalls Peronism and the invention of a provincial middle class, juxtaposing portraits of eccentric neighbours with meditations on how complex social reality is refracted through a child’s eyes.

You’ve probably already heard how awesome Aira is, and how everyone should read at least one of his many, many books.

New novellas from Aira are always a cause for celebration.

With many prolific writers it’s a case of diminishing returns. César Aira, who’s published over eighty books with more to come, is an exception, his open-ended, genre trespassing novellas attesting to his peculiar virtuosity.

Aira’s crossings (of temporality, genre, aesthetic language) are always surprising, captivating; they make us seek out formulas to describe their effects. Critics try to do so constantly. But Aira is always moving on to some other place, safe from any category.

South America’s answer to Haruki Murakami.

Uncanny imagination à la Calvino.

Irreverent inventiveness … without analogue in contemporary literature.

César Aira is wild. The laws of gravity do not apply.

Aira’s literature is but a parody of inventiveness, and at its core is an amazing degree of penetrating and unrelenting critical reflexivity.

His novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper and everything happens at the speed of thought…. You don’t know where you are or what you are looking at, but the air is full of electricity.

Aira will put knots in your brain.

Everything in Aira has that Mad Scientist feel to it.

Aira’s works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful.

César Aira is an exquisite miniaturist who toys with avant-garde techniques.

Outlandish B-movie fantasies are all part of the game. His best-known works are nonsensically hysterical.

I get so absorbed by an Aira novel that upon finishing I don’t remember anything. It’s like having a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.

A strange and arresting novel. Aira is firmly in the tradition of Borges and W.G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas.

Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.

To love the novels of César Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical, and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment.

Aira’s literary significance, like that of many other science fiction writers, comes from how he pushes us to question the porous line between fact and fantasy, to see it not only as malleable in history, but also blurred in the everyday. The engrossing power of his work, though, comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park.

Aira’s refusal to make any occurrence definitive gives the world depicted in the novel an element of the absurd. The result can be as frustrating as it is liberating. Whether or not Clarke ultimately catches sight of the hare is beside the point. Even if he found it, we’d soon discover that, maybe, after all, he didn’t. Or that it wasn’t a hare at all.

César Aira’s novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that Surrealist parlor game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse.

It works as a piece of art whose fresh, gorgeous images carry rich meanings about the nature of transformation. But it also works as a story that makes you miss your subway stop.

[Aira’s works are] dense, unpredictable confections delivered in a plain, stealthily lyrical style capable of accommodating his fondness for mixing metaphysics, realism, pulp fiction, and Dadaist incongruities.

Each element Aira draws our attention to is placed into sharp focus before being discussed in short, entertaining digressions.

In plain but meandering prose, Aira winds his off-kilter narrative into a metafictional loop in which Varamo, who has never written before, accidentally crafts a literary masterpiece.

Aira’s humorous writing style is absurd yet always ironic, simple in logic yet increasingly mystifying in message.

…a sprint through multiple bizarre situations, a few philosophical digressions, a charming light-heartedness, and exquisite sentences.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’s mere 87 pages are so multi-faceted and transporting and I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything. Like having a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.

Aira is a manifestly gifted writer who may find writing all too easy a job.

If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira.

Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed.