A Little Luck by Claudia Pineiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

As someone who now lives far away from my region of birth, I find stories about characters returning to their origins especially poignant. In “A Little Luck” Mary Lohan returns to the Buenos Aires suburb of her early life after a twenty year absence. She has a new look, eye colour (with the aid of contacts) and name which is handy because she's desperate not to be recognized. Though she nominally goes for work she's also curious to reconnect with this place that she abruptly left under mysterious circumstances many years ago. This novel drew me in on multiple levels over the course of the story. Firstly, there's a compelling tension about what made Mary initially leave and what her relationship is with someone who recognizes her. This is enhanced by a short crucial scene from her earlier life which is described multiple times like a recurring nightmare. When the significance of this event is revealed it's truly shocking. Next there's the emotional connection I felt as we get Mary's full back story. It's truly heartbreaking and tragic as she was caught in a situation with no easy answers. And finally there's the larger meaning of the story which contemplates issues such as chance, the loyalty of family and the precarious nature of insular communities.

The circumstance Mary found herself in is so difficult because the choices she made are understandable but it led to a horrific accident. Because the community is wracked with grief it's easier to blame Mary and conspire against her rather than forgive her. It made me reflect on incidents from my own past which could have turned out very differently for better or worse. The story also asks a powerful question about how strong we are as individuals, as a family and as a community when we're tested by terrible circumstances. The relative success or failure of individuals is often due more to chance than willpower. Mary reflects how “Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test. I only have a little luck.” It's poignant how the novel details how Mary's own mother was the victim of bad luck herself. Though she is severely tested, Mary also finds an opportunity to recreate herself with the help of another kind soul. While this story is centred around a tragedy it's beautiful how it also offers a hopeful message as she is able to survive the worst kind of loss.

Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

I can't think of another novel that has so deeply and intimately drawn me into the experience of someone living with a debilitating illness. Elena is in a late stage of Parkinson's disease where every physical action is timed around when her pills can be taken as these allow her a limited amount of movement. In the interim periods her body refuses to respond to messages from her brain and, even with the pills, normal actions which we take for granted are an enormous struggle. This is especially problematic as Elena is determined to visit someone on this day to call in an old debt. Her daughter Rita was recently found hanging in the belfry of a church. Elena doesn't accept the police's conclusion that it was a suicide and is determined to uncover the mystery behind her daughter's death. We follow her journey as she discovers the truth behind this tragic event and, in the process, get a profound insight into the challenges of her daily existence. However, this isn't a story that's as miserable as it sounds. Elena isn't the nicest person - often with good reason. She's irascible, extremely rude to some people and has a keen sense of irony. So following her thoughts and reflections is often a darkly funny and entertaining experience, but it's also very moving and enlightening. All these elements make this a riveting, revelatory and brilliantly imaginative story. 

Though Elena is only 64 years old she has the appearance of someone much older. She's unable to fully lift her head so that in the course of her journey our perspective of the world is limited to only what she can see. Usually this is people's shoes or the ground. This is one of the ways this narrative locks the reader so fully into her experience. At one point before her death, her daughter demanded she go to a beauty salon and, during the course of a pedicure, the beautician suggested she regularly use a cream on her feet. However, “she wasn't willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won't go down her throat because her head can't tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn't going to put calendula cream on her heels.” At almost every point in the story we're made aware of how all these necessary actions which most of us perform unconsciously require a big effort on her part because of the limitations her illness imposes. She comes to think of her disease as a separate entity in itself which she describes in the most disparaging and vicious terms like a hateful neighbour that has taken control and resides within her body.

There are so many lines in this book which made me attentive to aspects of physical existence which I normally don't consider. For instance, Elena observes how “She'd never had to think about her neck, about her eyebrows, to wonder whether they were muscles or flesh, or just skin, and she doesn't know what they are, but they hurt.” It's almost surreal how her illness makes her hyper-aware of things she hadn't previously considered so that her own body reveals itself as a foreign landscape. The story also gives an insight into the tremendous burden Elena's illness causes for the people around her. Before her death, Rita was Elena's full time carer assisting her with feeding, bathing, going to the bathroom and almost every daily action. This put an enormous mental, physical and financial strain on their relationship and Elena comments about how much they bickered. Rita also possessed some conservative values which caused conflicts and harm to people she encountered. I appreciated how the novel sympathetically shows the strenuous challenges Rita faced and the difficulty this caused in her relationship with her mother while also acknowledging her foibles at the same time. It's a tragic situation, but it's meaningful how Elena doesn't perceive herself as a victim and how she's committed to living though her illness has severely reduced the quality of her life. This is an example of a novel whose impact and meaning will continue to resonate with me for many years.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)

It's so exciting to read new fiction that imaginatively blends the surreal and supernatural to tell inventive (oftentimes horrific) literary tales. In Enriquez's short stories the narrators are often haunted by ghosts or plagued by curses. Spirits enact their revenge. Communities are driven into a frenzy by fear. These stories frequently focus on or are told through the points of view of the vulnerable and maligned: children who are impoverished or abused, disenfranchised teenagers or deviants. Neither the protagonists or the ethereal beings often adhere to a moral code. Many act deviously, tyrannically or selfishly. An abused woman is entrapped by a hotel's ghost. The “evil” which plagues a family is transferred onto an innocent girl. A young filmmaker knowingly films and sells videos of children swimming in a pool to a paedophile. The depiction of the sheer chaos of this society which doesn't necessarily reward the good or punish the bad is in many ways more terrifying than the sensational violence or gross details portrayed. It suggests a world that is restless and unhinged. These tales are filled with a lot of tantalizingly dark detail and imagery, but the problem is they too often rely on a twist or gimmick in their plotting. This frequently left me reeling (or rolling my eyes) from the shock of what's revealed rather than being moved by any profundity or psychological insight. 

Interestingly, I felt the final story in this collection 'Back When We Talked to the Dead' was the most successful. This is narrated from the collective point of view of a group of girls recalling a time when they secretly met to use a Ouija Board in order to contact or locate people they've lost. Their connection with the spirits is severed one night when a session ends in a terrifying way. This story hints at institutionalized violence which has led to people disappearing or falling between the cracks of a dysfunctional social system. The point of view evocatively brings to life the voices of friends who were once united but have grown apart because of age and the abiding fear of their actions. It's also genuinely tense and scary as we discover what freaked out these girls so much. Sadly, too many of the previous tales feel like they are self-consciously striving to disturb the reader. Two stories feature people defecating in the streets and multiple female characters aggressively and violently masturbate. I'm not prudish but the repetition of these kinds of details simply revolted me rather than engaged me. I can't see anything revelatory in this specific realism; it's just stomach turning.

The longest story in this book 'Kids Who Come Back' is almost novella-length and explores a theme common to many of the stories. Children frequently disappear in this collection only to return in an altered state where all innocence has been lost. This lengthy story is narrated from the point of view of a woman named Mechi who literally maintains an archive of lost and disappeared children in Buenos Aires. She becomes fascinated by a beautiful missing girl named Vanadis who abruptly returns one day, but not in as the person she was before. Many other lost children also reappear including many of whom definitely died and they are the same age they were when they vanished. People grow to fear them and see them as shells of the children they once were. This is a premise somewhat similar to another Argentinian story 'Underground' by Samanta Schweblin. I feel like Enriquez is able to more effectively build and draw out tension and mystery in this longer story. It better describes doubles or doppelgängers which appear in several tales. It's also more pointed in how it encapsulates a frequent theme of this collection where a neighbourhood or area and a group of people are “tainted” by a scandal or popular myth so they are in a sense “cursed”. The resulting social alienation is just as cruel as the rancour of the spirits. Perhaps the many positive elements of this longer story mean that I'd find Enriquez's fiction more successful in the form of a novel where her rich imagination can be given a constructive amount of room to stretch.

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Fiona Mackintosh & Iona Macintyre)

This is a novel with such an uplifting energy to it as it follows the adventures of a young woman caught in a time of bloody conflict and the formation of a modern nation. But it's also a clever and self-assured historical satire in the way it upturns patriarchal values in favour of those who are marginalized – especially female and queer individuals. “The Adventures of China Iron” feels like a comedy in the classic sense of beginning in tragic circumstances and ending with a joyous resolution. Set in Argentina during the political turbulence of 1872, the story concerns a journey of a heroine born into nothing; she is an orphan without a name, raised by a tyrannical woman and forced into marriage during her adolescence to the gaucho Martin Fierro, a heroic masculine figure from Argentine folklore. After giving birth to two sons she is cast aside by her famed husband and this is where the novel starts with this heroine establishing her own name as well as naming a stray dog who has become her only friend. She reclaims the name China from its dismissive/negative connotations (it's a Quechuan term for a lower-class girl or woman) and maintains her husband's surname of Iron, the English word for Fierro. From here she bands together with Liz, a Scottish woman travelling across country and Rosario, a cattle farmer searching for somewhere to set up with his herd. We follow their entertaining journey to find a home and establish a family that is “linked by more than bloodlines.”

It's great reading how China Iron becomes her own individual hacking off her hair and how this allows her to tread more easily between a masculine and feminine sensibility. I also found it moving the way she gradually establishes a sexual relationship with Liz to form emotional bonds and discover bodily pleasures which were previously denied to her. But one of the most powerful parts of her education comes in her new way of mentally mapping the world to understand the underlying national and economic conditions which result in social disparities. When drinking a cup of tea she comes to understand the “suffering that also travels in tea” and that in drinking it “we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them.”

This also informs what's happening in her own country especially when they come to stay with a Colonel who has basically enslaved a number of gauchos and tortures those who do not submit to the colonial powers. These are people whose labour is exploited because the attitude towards the gauchos is that “the only country they were going to get was the one they were building for the colonels and landowners”. Therefore it's no wonder that the narrative of Martin Fierro which depicts the abuse of the gauchos and their role in the country's independence from Spain was so desired by the people and he became a celebrated figure. But while doing so it also valorises a certain image of masculinity and relegates female participants like China to being little more than a footnote. So it's inventive how this novel rewrites this foundational text recasting the myth of Martin Fierro and how the epic poem came to be created.

I enjoyed how China's relationships with both Liz and Martin becomes more complex over the course of the story. But an issue I had was when China and her crew finally arrive at a community of Indians. The prose comes to feel so exaggerated in its lushness and overly romanticised. China believes that she becomes one of the Indians so much so that the narrative takes on a collective voice “we don't want to crush anything underfoot... Our rivers are alive and the streams are animals, they know that we live as one, that we only kill what we need to eat”. This idealized view of a community feels so over-the-top that it came across as ridiculously simplified when I'm sure the reality was much more nuanced and complex. I appreciate that the story was keeping to a more comic tone and it's refreshing to read a historical novel where queer individuals aren't fated to a life of misery or death. But, for me, the later part of the book undermines the power of the story thus far. Nevertheless, this novel is very clever in how it offers an alternative view of a nation's mythology and overall it's a very pleasurable read.

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell)

Like many people, I was fascinated by the surreal atmosphere and ambiguous meaning of Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin's novel “Fever Dream” when it first appeared in English a couple of years ago. Now a collection of her short fiction has just been published and it's of a similar sinister vibe with odd twists of logic that often veer into near nightmares. Here are stories of children that transform into butterflies, businessmen who are turned into farm hands, a dissatisfied wife who meets an amorous merman and a daughter whose new diet consists solely of consuming living birds. This subject matter could easily feel whimsical if it were written by another author, but Schweblin maintains elements of psychological truth so this fiction continues to feel real even if it's filled with the fantastical. Her stories often feel like puzzles where the meaning is tantalizingly close and I could solve it if I could just work out the intricately constructed design she's skilfully created. But, of course, these stories offer no definitive answers – just glimpses of the inexpressible fears, desires and carnage which simmer just under the surface of our everyday reality.

The way Schweblin approaches common themes from an unlikely angle brings out a new kind of emotional honesty. So subjects such as infidelity, miscarriages, eating disorders, spousal abuse, body image and depression are explored in these stories but in a way which defamiliarises the way we commonly think about them. Although the stories are fantasies they deal with serious issues. For instance, in the story 'Preserves' a woman whose unborn child dies in uterus goes through the process of pregnancy with the support of her family even though they know the child will be stillborn. It shows how the idea of a new child forms so fully in the minds of the family its due to be born into and becomes part of their lives even before its arrival. So the story considers how to deal with feelings of mourning which can arise in this tragic situation common to many families. It's a different kind of magical thinking from what Kit De Waal describes in her novel “The Trick to Time”.

Another story which had a strong resonance for me was the titular tale 'Mouthful of Birds' which describes the perspective of a father whose daughter begins only consuming living birds and refuses to engage in discussions. He's separated from his wife and when the daughter is left in his care he witnesses her deteriorating health because he doesn't want to support her barbaric new diet. In one of the few instances when the daughter speaks she asks if her father loves her and in this moment there is so much unexpressed longing and sorrow as she desperately tries to find a way to control her crumbling family and situation.

The way Schweblin approaches her subject matter feels most poignant when it’s teased out in her longer stories. I felt some of the less successful and least impactful tales were also some of the shorter pieces such as ‘Butterflies’ and 'Rage of Pestilence'. In these it seemed like a central concept was compressed too explicitly into surreal imagery. Some stories also stretch too far into the oblique and become twisted up in a convoluted structure such as 'Olingiris'. Schweblin’s ideas come more alive when they are situated in longer stories such as ‘Headlights’ where brides left on the roadside congregate into a vengeful swarm or 'Heads Against Concrete' where a narrator’s violent impulses, emotional disconnection and racial prejudice are translated into “high” art. Better yet, some of the most eerie tales are where the central object of the story remains entirely unseen and unnamed such as a couple’s desperate attempts to “capture” a child in 'On the Steppe' or a village of vanished children in 'Underground'.

Samanta Schweblin & writer Valeria Luiselli in conversation

Not all the stories in this book are so outrageously bizarre. Some such as 'Santa Claus Sleeps at our House' and 'The Test' are so deeply ensconced in the narrator’s perspective that reality seems to be shifting around them due to innocence or guilt. Still others movingly capture people’s concealed emotions such as 'The Size of Things' where a rich, successful man steadily regresses while inhabiting a toy shop. Other stories grope at understanding the unknowable emotional condition of others such as a man that suffers from depression in 'My Brother Walter' or the story ‘Irman’ where the death of a man’s wife swiftly leaves him perilously helpless.

Overall I loved getting lost in these tales with their refreshing flavour for the absurd. They brim with a vibrant creativity and I admire the way they offer a warped counter reality to life.

People in the Room by Norah Lange (translated by Charlotte Whittle)

This is the first novel by Norah Lange to be translated into English and it’s just been published by the wonderful independent press And Other Stories. It was written in Spanish and originally published in Argentina in 1950. In her day Lange was a celebrated member of the Argentine literary scene – especially the avant-garde Buenos Aires group of the 20s and 30s. Throughout her life she famously hosted many literary salons and associated with writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. She was awarded a Grand Prize of Honor by the Argentine Society of Writers having published poetry, memoirs, nonfiction and novels. Yet, she’s barely known outside her native country for reasons which César Aira’s introduction to the book and James Reith’s recent article in the Guardian interestingly suggest. It’s thrilling to discover a novel like “People in the Room” because, although I studied avant-garde literature at university from Borges to Alain Robbe-Grillet to Tristan Tzara, there were few female writers of this era included on the course list outside of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Sarraute. It’s somewhat alarming to think that Norah Lange was there all the time, but most North American and European readers had no access to her work.

As characteristic of the innovative art and writing from this time, “People in the Room” pushes the boundaries of character and narrative where we’re given few specific details about the protagonist and her situation. Instead the reader follows her labyrinthine train of thought as she voyeuristically observes three women in their thirties through a window across the street from where she lives. Her obsession with these neighbours leads to endless speculations about their potential status as criminals or tragic figures or secretive heroines. Curiously, though she makes tentative contact with the women, she doesn’t want to discover any actual facts about them – not even their names. It’s as if her observations can transform them into an endlessly tantalizing array of fictional characters of her own creation: “I knew, if I was patient, I could have their finished portraits just the way I liked finished portraits to be: for them to be missing something only I knew how to add”.

Maybe it was the frequent references to portraits and three women that made me fleetingly think of the portrait of the Brontë sisters as I was reading the novel. But it was thrilling to discover when I read in Aira’s introduction (which I only did after I finished reading the novel so as to avoid any spoilers or interpretation of the text before I’d experienced it myself) that Lange had publicly stated she was partly inspired by Branwell’s famous portrait of his sisters where a ghostly painted out figure looms in the background. There’s a popular romantic conception of the Brontës living a cloistered existence of literary creativity that seems to chime with this story. But “People in the Room” also doesn’t shy from exploring darkly troubling concepts as well. Throughout the book Lange refers to portraits as if to fix a version of the women in place before excitedly creating another portrait which shows them in a different light. But this leads to an unwieldy multiplicity: “She seemed to possess many portraits, as if constantly adding them to the hidden gallery of her own face; as if arranging, on the four walls of the drawing room, in order, the story of her face.” It’s fascinating how these descriptions naturally inspire ideas about our psychology and William James’ concept of how we have a different personality for each person we know. It suggests that no matter how dedicated we are in observing or spending time with one another we can never really know one another completely.

Branwell's portrait of the Bronte sisters

Alongside these fascinating ideas, there’s a compelling ambiguity throughout the text about the narrator herself. She’s a teenager on the brink of some great change who is directed by her family at one point to take a trip elsewhere. Yet, rather than meditate on her own state of being or future, she continues her frenzied focus on the women across the way who might be entirely in her imagination or mannequins or women involved in their own unknowable preoccupations. It’s as if she wants to preserve something about her creative process and imagination before yielding to the responsibilities and limitations of adult life. There’s a sombre tone to this enterprise “it would always be as if she was gathering memories beside a plot reserved for a grave.” There are frequent macabre references throughout the novel to death or the narrator’s expectation/desire/fear that the women she observes might soon die. Perhaps if they are dead she can better preserve her own idea of them without the messy complication of their real personalities. There’s a disturbingly bleak sort of romance to this which she describes stating “when I was fond of people I always imagined them dead.”

Getting brief clues about the narrator herself at different points in the text makes “People in the Room” a mystery wrapped in a mystery. I enjoyed the many layered and oblique ideas this book holds. It’s a novel which ought to be read alongside Norah Lange’s contemporaries for the fascinating concepts it explores and the way the curious story pushes the meaning of narrative. But it’s also a compelling exploration of the process of writing itself. The women are the narrator’s malleable characters which she endlessly enjoys reshaping, imbuing with her own psychology and destroying in a perverse godly act when she can no longer control them. It’s a novel that can be read in many different ways and would no doubt benefit from multiple rereadings. 

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell)

This gripping novel made me immediately flip back to the beginning to search for details I might have missed. I also felt compelled to search for other people’s opinions online to try to figure out what happened. “Fever Dream” is an incredibly creepy and mesmerising story about a woman named Amanda confined in a rural hospital having a tense conversation with her neighbour’s son David. She discusses with him her arrival at a holiday home with her daughter Nina (her husband is due to arrive later) and events involving David’s mother Carla. At first I found this to be quite a disorientating story because it’s largely composed of dialogue taking place in two distinct time periods, but once I had a good handle on the characters I felt completely wrapped in the mystery. I didn’t entirely understand what was happening, but I knew a lot was at stake as David continuously prompts Amanda to skip over parts of the story that are “not important.” Time is limited because he tells Amanda that her life is drawing to a close.

Reading “Fever Dream” felt like the experience of watching a Guillermo del Toro film where reality is slightly distorted as something very sinister is happening just beneath the surface of all the events taking place. We’re in that blurry territory that borders the fantastical and the psychologically disturbed. In this way, the novel accurately recreates the experience of being in a feverish state of mind. There are horses that go missing, a boy that turns into a monster, dead ducks, a disease that’s “like worms” and a poison that permeates the environment. Because of Amanda’s hazy sense of consciousness and uncertain memory, this story has an infectious hallucinatory effect that left me highly unsettled and grasping for understanding.

One of the prevailing themes of the novel is the degree to which we’re connected to the people we love the most. Amanda frequently expresses concern throughout the story that she wants to keep her daughter Nina within “rescue distance,” which is another way of saying within the bounds of her protective reach. She envisions it like an invisible rope connecting them and if Nina roams too far away this virtual rope will snap. This accurately reflects the way the people we love inhabit our consciousness – something which causes us happiness but also anxiety because we fear for their safety. In her debilitated state in the hospital, Amanda repeatedly expresses concern for the whereabouts of Nina. David assures her that this isn’t important, but of course for Amanda her daughter’s safety is the most important thing. The way in which children are individuals we alternately fear and fear for reminded me of the similarly gothic novel “The Children’s Home” by Charles Lambert. It could be that David is reminding Amanda that in the end we are quintessentially alone or he could be a sinister force compelling Amanda to break her connection with the person she cares for the most.

The tension over whether Amanda should trust David or his mother Carla is so interesting. Carla is mistrustful of her son, yet she seems to be the one preventing Amanda from leaving this uneasy environment when she becomes alarmed. Schweblin drops in tantalizing imagery such as the way Carla wears a gold bikini or the ominous dampness which covers Nina’s clothes which Amanda mistakenly assumes is dew from the grass. These are details which feel intensely vivid, yet their meaning is uncertain. The story needles the reader’s sub-conscious playing upon our unexpressed fears and anxieties in a way that simulates how we are helpless participants within a nightmare. For such a short novel “Fever Dream” makes an incredibly compelling and satisfying puzzle.

The Little Buddhist Monk by César Aira (Translated by Nick Caistor)

There's something really compelling and endearing about the prolific maverick Argentinian writer César Aira. He takes an idea and runs with it pulling the reader through madcap, existential or surreal adventures. Previously, I've only read his novel “The Seamstress and the Wind” but I can tell likes to take his characters on trips: both physical journeys and through altered psychological states that warp reality. “The Little Buddhist Monk” (first published in 2005 under the title “El Pequeño Monje Budista”) is about a diminutive monk who feels his life was meant for something much larger than the circumscribed existence in his native Korea. French couple Napoleon and Jacqueline arrive in the country seeking artistic inspiration and cultural edification. The small man has difficulty being seen, but once they notice him he offers to take them to an out of the way monastery. What at first appears like a realistic cross-cultural experience gradually morphs into something much more strange and abstract. In this way, Aira challenges and surprises while making uncommon connections.

The reader first becomes attuned to something off-kilter about Aira’s landscape when the monk and French couple travel to the monastery. Individuals periodically pull the emergency brake on the train and exit onto stations which look slightly off to Napoleon and Jacqueline. The monk confides to them that these people have been enchanted by witches that inhabit the surrounding environment and find it fun to prank travellers into stopping at stations which don’t really exist. This concept of people being controlled by unknown forces repeats in later revelations about the monk’s state of being. It prompts questions about the degree of liberty people are capable of possessing. We often dream of living beyond the bounds of the lives we’re born into, but few people are actually able to break out of the paths created through our particular circumstances and culture. It also asks the degree of difference between one place and another in the modern world: “globalisation, which nowadays had converted all civilisations into one.” The French couple travel to experience some “authentic” kind of other, yet find themselves in a reality that has merely been formatted for their consumption.

Another dominant concept of the novel is about the question of perspective. Napoleon is a photographer who takes 360 degree photos as a way of trying to capture the totality of a particular time and place. The mischievous monks at the monastery dart in and out of the picture frame because they find it funny, but their image isn’t captured due to the long exposure. So does Napoleon’s photo fully capture the reality of this place? Aira questions the validity of realism in artwork stating “The less realist a work of art, the more the artist has been obliged to get his hands dirty in the mud of reality.” It could be that through his absurdist storytelling, the author more fully engages with our psychological reality rather than novels that render a landscape within nature’s laws. One of the final concepts this novel poses is a television program which the monk is desperate to watch as it claims to definitively map female genitalia. This is a humorous joke about some men’s inability to sexually satisfy women because they can’t locate the pleasure spot, but it also says something about our difficulty in really seeing each other even when we’re as intimate as possible and completely stripped down.

It’s challenging to get the reader to truly care about the journey of the characters in such cerebral writing. But I feel Aira shows real empathy for his characters’ situations and takes their struggles seriously even while driving them through the funhouse of his creation. There’s tension in the French couple’s relationship when Jacqueline sees no place for herself in Napoleon’s all-encompassing photographs. She finds that “In real life there were no enchanted princesses, only hopes extinguished by routine, by prosaic and gradual deaths.” Their many journeys abroad do little to bring the pair emotionally closer together. I was even more compelled by the monk’s dilemma who seeks to become larger than the small existence he’s been programmed to live.

Aira is such a curious writer, but I think his novels only manage to be so compelling because they are so brief. There are now over eighty of them! His style of leaping from idea to idea around a central story concept wouldn’t be sustained very well in a larger fictional work. For instance, I don’t think he could pull off a novel as long as Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsolled” or "The Buried Giant" which follow dream-like structures. Nevertheless, Aira’s absurdist imagery peppered with philosophical musing has such a seductive appeal. It’s invigorating writing that has a curious way of lingering in the reader’s imagination.

The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira (Translated by Rosalie Knecht)

I had almost finished reading César Aira's short novel on my way home from a book launch last night when I stopped at a Chinese takeaway to get my dinner. After placing my order, I sat down to continue reading when an eight year old boy came up to me and asked if I knew I had entered a force field which transported me to another time. I replied I didn't know that and asked what time I was now in. He said we are now in 2008 which is the year he was born. He looked up thoughtfully and reasoned that this meant he wasn't really here yet. Such an unexpected plunge into the realm of fantasy is entirely in sync with this surreal and surprising novel.

The main story involves a car chase. Seamstress Delia Siffoni's son has gone missing. Believing he might be in the back of a neighbour's large truck that has embarked on a long haul drive, she pursues him. Her gambler husband Ramón pursues Delia and in pursuit of Ramón is a mysterious little blue car. Following all of them is a gust of wind named Ventarrón which carries a wedding dress. There's also a sinister monstrous baby let loose on the world after a horrific incident. This might all sound bizarre enough, but it gets a lot stranger. There's an Alice in Wonderland-type journey through the convoluted labyrinth of a truck. One character's skin colour changes. A meteorological phenomenon falls in love. At all times, you are aware that this novel is a construct as it is a story being composed by a writer sitting in a Parisian cafe. In doing so, Aira creates a bewitching tale at the same time as meditating on the meaning of invention, memory and art.

The writer is upfront at the novel's beginning that all he has for this book is a title. How he goes about constructing a story to fill that title is something he pauses to consider in depth. Most would consider that novels are formed out of a blend of a writer's experience and imagination. What else could it be? But Aira is intent on utilizing the state of forgetfulness for his creativity rather than inventing a story: “In loss everything comes together.” He's mistrustful of imagination because he feels it will always draw upon memory which is unreliable. Rather than tie his creation to the past he wants it to exist freely: “Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything into the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. I seek it, to oblivion, in the insanity of art.” So the novel is a sort of freeform exercise based in what he doesn't recall and the result is a bizarre episodic series of events and descriptions which follow a dream-like logic.

Since I was having trouble puzzling over what to make of Aira's novel I asked these cute kids what they thought it was about. They answered time travel and Vikings.

I'm not sure I believe it's possible for Aira or “the writer” to create a story untied to the past. You certainly can't fit the strange images and twists of the story into any neat interpretation, but that doesn't mean they aren't based in part on his lived experience or emotional experience. He tries to hold his characters such as Delia in the present as she is spontaneously created: “Delia is not the luminous miniature in the reels of any movie projector. I said she was a real woman, and I submit myself to my words, to some of them at least... to the words before they make sentences, when they are still purely present.” But details arise, such as how the local housewives who don't work look sneeringly down upon Delia for maintaining a profession as a seamstress even though her husband works. This economic imbalance and sexist social injustice feels like it was inspired by the writer's experience either directly or indirectly. Similarly, there is a touching way how the writer describes his boyhood when the trucker Chiquito created snowmen for him to enjoy. The sentiment of this friendly, playful gesture feels real as well. I'm not saying these things happened to Aira and I never try to interpret a writer’s life into my reading, but how can there be any emotional resonance if it didn’t come from a person with experience? It feels to me like there is an emotional truth, rather than historical truth, which comes through whether the writer is conscious of it or not.

César Aira is an incredibly prolific Argentinian novelist with around eighty novels and novellas to his name. That his output is so rapid isn’t surprising when you read this novel – not because it lacks craft or refinement, but there is a rapid fire quality to the prose where ideas and images are boiling over to form an outrageous plot. His writing has been compared to Borges and it came across like reading an Italo Calvino novel to me or watching a David Lynch film. It’s clearly not cosy fiction, but it’s sophisticated and energetic writing which will leave you scratching your head with curious wonder. I have a feeling certain powerful eerie scenes will stick with me more than his theories on narrative. Most of all, I admire the sheer uncompromising audacity and verve of this novel.