Experimental Summer: The Unstoppable César Aira

This is the latest in a series of reviews of experimental fiction written by BookPeople Brian C. and Jenn S.

Brian and Jenn have made it their mission this summer to open up their reading lives to the weird, the odd, the curious, the avant garde, and the totally out-there in the world of fiction.  The previous review in this series, Ava by Carole Maso, is available HERE.

Here’s Jenn, on Argentine author César Aira.

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For the next installment of Experimental Summer, I’ve decided to take you to Argentina with contemporary novelist César Aira.

Argentine writers are notorious experimenters. They’re also notoriously awesome, and rightfully so. Aira’s writing descends from a line of great authors, including two of my favorites, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar; and most English editions of Aira’s books feature a prominent blurb from Roberto Bolaño. Given that several giants of twentieth-century experimental writing happen to be Argentina’s most famous authors, Aira had his work cut out for him in finding a new approach to fiction. I mean, Borges already contained the entire possible universe in his infinite “Library of Babel,” and Cortázar wrote Hopscotch, a literally never-ending book—I started reading it in 2007 and, I swear, I’ve been reading it ever since. What fictional possibilities could be left for Aira?

The answer lies in Aira’s unusual technique: fuga hacia adelante. The common English version of his term is “fleeing forward.” It isn’t some abstract literary theory, but more of a writing practice. Each day, Aira wakes up, goes to a coffeehouse in Buenos Aires, and writes for exactly one hour. We’re talking pen and paper, no processing machines involved. After an hour, he is done writing for the day. He never revises a single thing he writes. Once it’s on paper, he doesn’t change a word. The next day, he simply picks up precisely where he left off. It’s astonishing. No matter what kind of corner he wrote himself into yesterday, he has to write his way out of it. While most novelists write in bits and pieces, frequently rearranging or cutting paragraphs, Aira leaves everything as is. As Harpers critic Rivka Galchen puts it, “To write this way is to cede some control to the medium.”

This might sound like stream-of-consciousness writing or something akin to the American Beats—an unending scroll of random, unfiltered thoughts. But the remarkable thing about Aira is his attention to craft. Without knowing about his technique, the reader would have no idea that he didn’t sit and edit his manuscripts for months. Each of his books is about 100 pages or so, roughly novella length. And each is crafted with sharp attention to even minor details and recurrences.

For this week’s column, I read Ghosts, probably his most famous English publication. While I didn’t notice that he had written it without revising, I did get the sense that the story was constantly progressing. Ghosts tells the story of a half-built apartment building in Buenos Aires on New Years Eve. The building should be done, but it seems to be perpetually in mid-construction. Taking its time to settle on its main cast, the book first introduces the future tenants and their army of decorators, and then follows the workmen as they unload bricks by throwing them to each other three at a time (!). Eventually, we meet the watchman, Raúl Viñas, who lives in the unfinished building with his family until the tenants occupy it. Other than his family, the only other current residents are…some ghosts. Yes, ghosts. Real ones. This is Experimental Summer, after all. The ghosts are all male and, for whatever reason, always naked. They seem mostly harmless, until they invite Patri, half daughter of the watchman and his wife, to join their New Year’s party. The book comes to a striking conclusion which, given the story’s humor, comes as a surprise. Aira’s unusual writing technique is palpable only in the text’s perpetual forward motion—the story never seems to stop, to take stock, to evaluate or recap. It simply continues.

Aira might not be as famous as his fellow Argentine writers, but he is certainly getting more of a name in the U.S. To learn more about his style and his unusual personality, take a look at Rivka Galchen’s “Into the Unforseen: A romance of César Aira” in the June issue of Harpers; Galchen meets up with Aira in Buenos Aires, and we find out why Aira’s mother deemed her son the worst living writing in the world.

You can also read about the process of translating his works in Alissa Kennedy’s interview with one of Aira’s English translators, “Translating César Aira: A Q. & A. with Rosalie Knecht“. There are several more profiles and interviews circling the book blogs, too. So far, of the 70 some novels he’s written, only a handful have been translated and published in English. Something tells me that’s about to change.

Another great reason to read Aira is that he chooses only small publishers for his work. That means when you go buy any of his books, including Ghosts and his latest, The Seamstress and the Wind, you’re a) supporting New Directions, a great indie press, b) taking home a pocket-sized paperback with a seriously attractive cover design, and c) making the effort to seek out an experimental writer, which is the reason Aira gives for picking small publishers. His books are fast, delightful reads, and you’ll probably want to collect them all. I do, anyway.