La costurera y el viento

by César Aira

Prodigioso, desaforado, incontenible, del irante son acaso los adjetivos inevitables cuando uno bucea en ese librero de las maravillas que es la biblioteca César Aira, unas obras deliciosamente incompletas, en perpetua expansión, donde al parecer cada lector puede encontrar una fábula favorita. Roberto Bolaño señaló La costurera y el viento como su libro preferido de César Aira.

Un niño se queda atrapado en la caja de un tráiler; consigo arrastra una cauda de personajes –su madre costurera con el vestido de bodas que está terminando, su padre en un camión casi de juguete, la novia de la boda y por supuesto, también el viento, Ventarrón, capaz de materializar lechos y mesas, de enamorarse y de irse de espaldas. Todos van no sólo al final del mundo, sino a una aventura donde se toma el espacio virgen de la Patagonia como si fuera la primera página de una literatura personalísima, que urge poblar con los más extraños vehículos, amores, personajes inolvidables.

Sí, Aira trabaja con los sueños que el cine parecía haberle robado a la literatura, y los recupera y multiplica, pero cobijado y frecuentemente escondido por esta narrativa donde lo único que se puede esperar es lo inesperado, hay un ensayista agudísimo que inyecta los venenos de su inteligencia aprovechando el deslumbramiento que produce su imaginación. ¿Qué es la velocidad? ¿Qué es la locura? ¿Cómo escribir?, se pregunta y se responde Aira, sin perder nada, ganándolo todo para su novela.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Magical Realism, Spanish Literature, Latin American, Novella, Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

Reviews

[Guille · Rating 1 out of 5]

¿Cómo no preguntarse si esto es en serio o en broma?

No deja de ser enternecedor asistir al intento de un artista de realizar un acto de creación absoluta, de querer sacar algo de la nada, y así entender que se desprecie la memoria, que se quiera salir de uno mismo, que el artista se revele ante lo verosímil, que no se respete el 1 2 3… y se quiera meter ahí mismo, en donde menos se lo espera, un 3 2 7 o incluso una H o algo peor, pero, ¡ay, amigo¡, como tú bien dices “ir a la Patagonia no es tan fácil”.

No es suficiente que un escritor siga escribiendo el relato en un café porque no se atreve a pedir la cuenta al camarero, que su impotencia la quiera compensar con niños que nacen agarrados al miembro del violador de su madre, o de vientos que hablan o se enamoran, o de vestidos de novia que bailan en formas hermosísimas a miles de metros del suelo, no, amigo, para mí no es suficiente. Necesito entender y aquí no entendí un carajo (algunos dirán que eso es problema mío, no del relato. Es cierto, pero también soy yo el que pone las estrellas). Es más, me jodió llegar a ese final sin final, que era lo único que me incitaba a seguir. Será que el camarero al fin se acercó.

Pero no me rendí y busqué explicaciones en la red. Me costó, pero al final encontré una que me lo aclaró todo:

“El libro exhibe a la Patagonia como un cuerpo textual y textualizado complejo, a través del cual se problematiza la construcción literaria de la región, como zona liminal profusa en ficciones de identidades. Desde una ostensible performatividad narrativa, la novela conjuga la invención del espacio con la frecuente referencia a una cartografía histórica y literaria que se actualiza en una dispersión de afiliaciones intertextuales.” L. M.

Nos ha fastidiado, así sí.

La novela es cortita, y aun así se me hizo larguiiiiiiiiiiiiiísima, tanto que, habiéndola empezado el lunes, yo también exclamé algo parecido a eso que dice Aira: ¡Han pasado tantos años que ya debe de ser martes!.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

though most of césar aira's books tend to be slim affairs, they make up with inventiveness for whatever they may lack in length. the prolific argentine novelist's works are wildly imaginative, and the depth of his creativity seems matched by the ease with which he is able to blend, cross, and move within different genres. the seamstress and the wind (costurera y el viento), is the sixth of aira's books (of more than eighty) to be translated into english.

the seamstress and the wind combines a number of elements that, at first glance, might appear to make for a jumbled, undisciplined, and haphazard work. the brilliance of aira's writing, however, is that he, like a literary alchemist, transmutes disparate components into something fantastical and rewarding. mixing the mundane with the phantasmagorical, aira's novels are richly engaging, for one is never sure upon which point the story is about to veer into the realm of the wholly unforeseen. the word 'predictable' is one that ought never be employed to describe any aspect of aira's fiction. the magnificent range in his work is no mere clever device, but instead reflects an unfettered imagination which allows for a story to freely evolve. the effect is disarming and seems refreshingly natural (perhaps in contrast to the abundance of forced narratives that abound elsewhere in contemporary literature). contributing to the overall affluence of his writing are his reliably intriguing characters, seemingly average yet possessed by a charming singularity. the seamstress and the wind features characters the likes of which will not soon be forgotten (nor their entrances into the story).

césar aira is remarkably gifted, and his ability to seamlessly infuse his work with humor, fantasy, poignant observation, unrestrained style, and invigorating prose is truly amazing. although each one of his books is entirely unlike its predecessor, they all seem to complement one another in a way that reinforces the prowess of his creativity. the more aira that i read, the more easily i am convinced that he is one of the most talented, original, and important writers at work today. though few of his books are even as long as one hundred fifty pages, they leave the reader bewitched long after the story has concluded.

but i resist giving it up, and in that resistance it occurs to me that there's something else i could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself. taking control of forgetting is little more than a gesture, but it would be a gesture consistent with my theory of literature, at least with my disdain for memory as a writer's instrument. forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful... and at the root of the dream idea there must have been something of that, because those serial prophecies, so suspicious, lacking in content as they are, all seem to come to an end at a vertex of dissolution, of forgetting, of pure reality. a multiple, impersonal forgetting. i should note, in parentheses, that the kind of forgetting that erases dreams is very special, and very fitting for my purposes, because it's based on doubt as to whether the thing we should be remembering actually exists; i suppose that in the majority of cases, if not in all of them, we only believe we've forgotten things when actually they had never happened. we haven't forgotten anything. forgetting is simply a sensation.

the seamstress and the wind was rendered from the spanish by rosalie knecht, whom received a fulbright grant to work with aira himself on the translation. ms. knecht is the fourth different translator of aira's works into english. presumably (and deservedly), new directions will continue to publish many of his works in translation for years to come.

[Steve]

Contradiction and whimsy

...it occurs to me that there's something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself. Taking control of forgetting is little more than a gesture, but it would be a gesture consistent with my theory of literature, at least for my disdain for memory as a writer's instrument. Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful...

The Argentinian César Aira (b. 1949) is a writer I am still trying to locate in my spectrum of likes and dislikes. I read his remarkable An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter a few months ago - a unique vision which, finally, was not able to satisfy completely the expectations it fostered, though it has stuck with me like a burr on my sock. I know that I shall have to read that book again.

The Seamstress and the Wind is a very different kind of book; yes, it is brief and extremely self-reflective, but it is also radically self-contradictory in a manner not seen in Episode.

I suppose that in the majority of cases, if not in all of them, we only believe we've forgotten things when actually they had never happened. We haven't forgotten anything. Forgetting is simply a sensation.

Hmmm, what happened to the power? And his disdain for memory as a writer's instrument was waived a few pages later in a long passage of "his" memories as a young boy. Of course, these "memories" were more like dreams, very concrete and realistic for a few sentences, then moving by some private association in Aira's mind to another concrete, realistic stretch, oftentimes contradicting the previous passage. So, not really memories, but something else couched in the trope of memories, though these non-memories do reflect what little I know of Aira's life faithfully enough...

I have always venerated work above all else; work is my god and my universal judge, but I have never worked, because I never needed to, and my passion exempted me from working because of a bad conscience or a fear of what others might say.

Every incident is erected and then dismantled by a series of contradictions. An urgent forced wedding is imposed, a wedding dress is fabricated, the neighborhood is in an uproar, but there is no groom; there is mention of hysterics taking nuptial fantasies for reality, but then, again, it was advisable to pay attention to it because as a general rule that was as right as the truth.

Naturally, a contradiction is central to the book's "plot". First, the narrator's friend appears to vanish during play, then it is the narrator who is alleged to have vanished; but then, again, the disappearance of the friend sends the eponymous heroine off to Patagonia in search of her son, increasingly encumbered by contradictions and qualifying phrases, not to mention an incomplete wedding dress, where she experiences many, shall we say, unlikely events. Among other adventures, a wind sweeps her thousands of feet into the air at "supersonic speed." Of course, she finds herself safely on her feet, unable to explain how. One of many such occurrences.

Unlike the modernists, Aira's contradictions and qualifications do not try to make epistemological, metaphysical, psychological points - they appear to be entirely whimsical, as are the "events" and "explanations" which arise and the insertions of the author's thoughts and observations as he writes the book on café terraces in Paris. These latter, too, largely dissolve into a mist of contradictions. Aira claims that it is a point of pride that he does not plan or re-write, that he writes himself out of the dead ends he wrote himself into rather than revise.

It's as if everything had already happened. And, in fact, it did all happen; but at the same time it's as if it hadn't happened, as if it were happening now. Which is to say, as if nothing had happened.

This is a game of permutations... Little is left standing other than the author's companionable voice, murmuring pleasant nonsense into your ear. This one is not going to stick to my socks.

My rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/792...

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is Aira's agenda?

Cesar Aira has written 80-odd novels in cafes. He sits there, cooks up something, writes himself into a corner, and then gets himself out of it the next day.

Ok - so here I've dispensed with that information which every reviewer has to give about this Argentinian writer. This information, however, is presented in most cases as a hidden disclaimer for the occasional slapdash, and almost always fantastic and near incredible, moments in Aira's fiction, most notable of which are the contusions and contortions of his plots. What else can you expect from a writer who writes like that?

To this, I would pose a more simple question - Why does he write like that and like that only? We should not be naive to assume that he doesn't realize what shortcomings it leads to in his fiction. The guy has more finished works than 10 writers, so the idea that he simply hasn't learnt, or is taking a simpler route, should be quashed.

Aira makes his agenda a bit clear in his book. He is writing the book as we are reading it. His crusade seems to be against the kind of art that emerges from the machinations of memory. Conversely, he posits memory as a viable proof of forgetting, and wants his art to be free from the autobiographical weight that it imposes. Instead, he chooses forgetting and the aesthetic of sudden inspiration. Inspiration, not imagination! For even imagination, if let free, wallows in the memories of experiences lived.

Aira's is a sentient choice, one aimed at arriving at an originality that - despite being original - is sentient of its inevitable gravitation towards Surrealism. For - what can a novel, written on successive evenings in a Parisian cafe, born out of the whim of a title that the novelist clings to with a 'blank obstinacy' even before he has any notion of the plot, become but a bit of a dreamy farce.

All Aira's novels should be read with this understanding, including this one. Now, beyond this, any talk about the novel itself would be a spoiler.

Recommended for those who 'appreciate' baseless plotting, and understand it as a particularly Argentinian trait, one that the Chilean Bolano was mesmerized by.

My review of another Aira work in the link below
An Episode in the life of a Landscape Painter (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...)

[Jim Elkins]

When magic realism is too strong an influence

I still think Aira is one of the best living writers. He can be tremendously inventive, repeatedly unpredictable, quirkily self-reflective. This book is an older one, written in 1991, and it's one of the few I haven't enjoyed. It's much more along the lines of Latin American magic realism of the 1970s and 1980s, with the addition of a postmodern authorial voice. At the beginning, Aira says he doesn't want to follow the dictates of memory, and there's a wonderful quotation along those lines that he attributes to Boulez:

"Memory makes things felt, heard, and seen rise into the light, a bit the way a bolus of grass rises again in a ruminant. It may be chewed, but it is neither digested nor transformed." (p. 9)

The problem is that the opposite of this dependence on memory is, in this book, a continuous whimsical magic-realist inventiveness. There are many reasons to dislike magic realism, and they have been well rehearsed. In this context the two most pertinent are:

(1) magic realism is the symptom of a need to continuously produce wonder, and that itself reveals a more interesting problem: that the author feels reality calls for a kind of frantic augmentation, as if whatever is ordinary is part of an oppressive, uninteresting or even punishingexistence that has to be magicked at all costs, and

(2) magic realism has, by principle, no rules, and that freedom also removes a constraint on the reader's attention: if the author has no guiding ideas, then the reader is permitted a similar freedom, and that includes the freedom to not follow along, to not agree that magic has been made, to refuse to find meaning or emotion in unexpected transformations. If anything can happen, the rules of the writing are relaxed to the point where it is no longer possible for the author to make a misstep. Where anything is permissible, there is also no failure, no tension in watching the author negotiate the invented world.

"The Seamstress and the Wind" relaxes, gives away, the real oddity that Aira can conjure by imagining that fireworks are always entrancing, that they will create the same cognitive dissonance, the same uncanny surprises, as a more personal and less programmatic sense of existential humor. Aira is interesting, I think, in inverse proportion to his affinity for magic realism.

[Lee Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Other than a touching three-page dialogue between the seamstress and the wind toward the end and someone violating a pregnant woman and then finding upon withdrawal a phosphorescent demon clasped to his member, it reads more or less like a loose and liberal first draft? By far, of the five Aira books available in translation I've now read in about a month, I'd read this one after you read An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Ghosts, The Literary Conference, and How I Became a Nun. Or if you prefer to read them in ascending order of awesomeness, start with this one? Whimsical to a fault, metafictional in a bad way (is there really a good way?), doesn't evoke much of a palpable world (not even Patagonia, where some of it's set), very few halting images. Generally, the threads of the story are carried away by the wind of the author's whim. Just really not my bag. At best it's fabulistic. At worst it's very boring. It's true what Bolano said: once I started reading Aira I didn't want to stop. But Roberto also said Aira's mostly boring, and that's true for this one except for a few sparks. I may pick up a few other little Aira books once they're translated (or even try one in Spanish) but not for quite a while. I enjoyed his steadier third-person tone (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Ghosts) way more than the lighter metafictional fabulistic first-person all-over-the-freakin'-place tactics. The latter seem to me to lack in heft, but for all their all-over-the-placeness I didn't find them all that funny or enjoyable to follow.

[Paloma · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Hay cosas que parecen eternas, y sin embargo pasan. La muerte misma lo hace.”

Este es el primer libro que leo de César Aira y la verdad es que la experiencia no me ha resultado tan grata. Aunque se trata de un relato muy corto (apenas 100 hojas), me tomó mucho tiempo terminarlo y nunca logré conectar con la historia. Ahora bien, creo que esto tiene que ver más con mis preferencias como lectora porque este texto es, en mi opinión muy experimental y esto es algo que no disfruto mucho en los libros. A mí me gustan tramas claras, con estructura y con un hilo conductor lógico, porque si no, me desconcentro y pierdo el interés. Y, La Costurera y El Viento es justo lo contrario: es un experimento, con muchas libertades, con este planteamiento del escritor-narrador que escribe una historia al mismo tiempo que es protagonista y puede entrar y salir de su propio relato con facilidad. Sin duda, existen también muchas licencias –cambios de narradores, mezcla de escenas de la vida cotidiana con elementos fantásticos, entre otros– que no son malas en sí mismas, para mí no funcionan.

Al preguntarme de qué trata el libro, podría decir que es la historia de un narrador, que escribe sobre un momento de su infancia: el día que su amigo Omar desapareció literalmente frente a sus ojos, y la búsqueda que inician la madre y el padre del niño, que los lleva a los confines de la Patagonia, con choques de camiones, vuelos por los aires, casinos clandestinos, diálogos con el viento, y el nacimiento de un monstruo. Como mencioné, no sé si es que realmente no logro conectar con este tipo de literatura, pero al final sentí que quedaron muchísimos cabos sueltos, explicaciones que, en lo personal, yo sí necesitaba, y una incomprensión ante tantos elementos fantásticos presentes que al final no tienen (o no encontré) un vínculo claro con los primeros planteamientos. Por ejemplo, nunca se resuelve el misterio que inicia este libro, es decir, la desaparición de Omar. Y para mí hubiera sido fundamental saber qué pasó.

No obstante, vale la pena reconocer algo: la escritura de Aria es impecable y sumamente poética. Por ejemplo, los dos primeros capítulos tienen tremendas líneas que dan fe de la calidad de escritor ante el que estamos, y que se encuentran presentes a lo largo del texto. De hecho, estas partes en donde se abordan cuestiones más personales a manera de reflexión o ensayo literario me han parecido sumamente emotivas y me han conmovido mucho, porque me han hecho sentido:

“Uno puede llegar a creer que tiene otra vida, además de la suya, y lógicamente cree que la tiene en otro lado, esperándolo. Pero le bastaría hacer la prueba una sola vez para comprobar que no es así. Un solo viaje basta (yo hice dos). Hay una sola vida, y está en su lugar.”

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so completely bemused by this book that I don't know whether to continue writing or just shrug my shoulders and go get some ice cream. What can do about an author who never edits, never revises, but who keeps pressing on regardless where it takes him. And it takes him to some really weird places, like the strange wastes of Patagonia where Aira severally dumps his characters and lets them carom off one another.

Let's see what we have here: We have a young wife named Delia Siffoni, who is searching for her son Omar (who, apparently isn't lost); her husband Ramon, who's searching for her; the truck driver Chiquito in whose truck Delia thinks Omar is; Silvia Balero, who is to get married in a day or so; Silvia's wedding dress, a character in its own right; the Monster, who was brought into existence from Silvia; and Sir Ventarrón, one of the winds of Patagonia (yes, as I said).

Who would have thought that this short novel by César Aira, who hails from Coronel Pringles in the southern part of the State of Buenos Aires (near Bahia Blanca), could hold one's attention and bemuse the reader so? Well, he does. Reading The Seamstress and the Wind is like viewing a Dali painting in motion. There is one odd little paragraph near the end that puts it all in a nutshell:

Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don't know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We'd take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick. That must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things.... It was healthy and entertaining.... The wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass ... and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another ... until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.

This paragraph is a microcosm of the novel and a delightful statement of Aira's authorial philosophy. Now I'm going to have to buy some more of Aira's books because the form of candy he provides is highly addictive.

[Rise · Rating 4 out of 5]

César Aira can be considered a "micro-novelist", which is to say, a writer with a predilection for an almost-scientific precision of details and a predisposition to short-length novels. His writing method was to simply place one word after another. He never revised much of what he wrote, never planned ahead what he was going to write, and simply wrote whatever came to mind.

In an interview he said that not revising is not a deliberate choice for him, "it just seems to me like the natural way of doing it." When starting to read and correct what he wrote months before, he's "overcome with laziness, or with self-deception, and I leave it as it is."

His genre of writing can be classified as "spontaneous realism", a type of writing that produces a constellation of ideas, free of linearity, and full of superfluity. They are characterized by contradiction and spontaneity, with strong aversion to the "scriptedness" and predictability of plot.

Of the half dozen translated books by Aira to date (out of the 5 or 6 dozens of them published in Spanish), The Seamstress and the Wind had the most schematic of plots. It was essentially all over the place. To enumerate the elements (characters) of this short novel: there's a writer working in a Parisian café, a 'kidnapped' child, his seamstress mother who ran after him, his father who ran after her, a truck driver, a levitating wedding gown sewn by the seamstress, the betrothed teacher who ran after her wedding gown, a 'Paleomobile' made from an ancient animal shell, a powerful talking wind, and a monster. The plot, in other words, is mayhem. (Full review)

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Niet mijn favoriete Aira, maar nog steeds erg genietbaar in zijn absurditeit!

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set on the wild plains of Patagonia this is Aira at his best, weaving a fantastical tale of the search for a missing young boy that triggers an epic adventure all told with his usual economy of words, in less than 150 pages.

There’s no knowing where an Aira novel will head, his trademark witty and clever twists take it to a direction impossible to guess. Even the genre the next chapter will be from is a mystery.
This is a less philosophical work than some of his translations and an easier and more plot driven read, though..it’s not quite that simple.

Ultimately, it’s a wonderful piece of storytelling, and the great writer at height of his powers.

THE ABYSS THAT opened before Delia Siffoni had (and still has) a name: Patagonia. When I tell the French I come from there (barely lying) they open their mouths with admiration, almost with incredulity. There are a lot of people all over the world who dream of traveling some day to Patagonia, that extreme end of the planet, a beautiful and inexpressible desert, where any adventure might happen.
They're all more or less resigned to never getting that far, and I have to admit they're right. What would they go there to do? And how would they get there, anyway? All the seas and cities are in the way, all the time, all the adventures. It's true that tour companies simplify trips quite a bit these days, but for some reason I keep thinking that going to Patagonia is not so easy. It is something quite different than any other trip.

I was fortunate enough to visit Patagonia frequently in the five years I was in Chile, between 2007 and 11. Fortunately, Aira is quite right..

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

La capacidad narrativa de Aira es sorprendente. Puede escribir tres o cuatro “novelitas” por año como él mismo dice, sin agotarse y sin perder adeptos.

La presente obra tiene imágenes poderosas, absurdas y barrocas. Es Aira ciento por ciento. Tiene pasajes divertidos y chispazos de profundidad intelectual.

La Patagonia toma cuerpo, deja de ser un espacio geográfico para convertirse en la tierra del viento e irrumpir como personaje de la novela.

Lo único que podemos esperar es lo inesperado.

[Cathrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am loving this book
Reading and rereading
Fascinating!



Would love to rate it 7 stars :-)
Wild
Every paragraph an insane novel in its own right!





"Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to 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."

Cesar Aira.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why do I love reading Aira? Well, his books are incredibly immediate. We get the sense (and we’re right on the money) that Aira is writing these events on the fly, as if he’s watching the events occur as he dramatically narrates them to us. There’s so much energy behind his scenes. It’s worth remembering Aira’s writing process. He sits down in a cafe in the morning and writes whatever comes to mind, even allowing the events in the cafe to invade the story (like a fly, or a drunk man). In this way, his story is not only a story but also a record of its own production. He writes himself into puzzles and then writes himself out of them the next day, refusing to make things easy on himself by allowing extensive revision. Not just anyone can pull this off, by which I mean that few writers following this method could come up with something anyone would want to read, but somehow Aira does it, creating something not simply entertaining and certainly not simply interesting because of the method of its production; besides this, he comes up with something meaningful and thoughtful, often something haunting.

On to The Seamstress and the Wind. I just mentioned how Aira writes in a cafe and includes whatever is going on in the writing; well, here we open the book to find Aira in a cafe in Paris, writing about what he’s thinking about as he writes in a cafe in Paris. It’s the new book:

"These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.” "

It’s a little tricksy, sure, but writing about whatever he’s doing also serves to introduce one the issues he plays with in this book: memory; or, rather, forgetting, losing, maybe never having. We find out that the title he clings to is the result of a dream he had. It was a brilliant dream, a vivid story, a marvel he couldn’t wait to write down, and it had something to do with a seamstress and the wind.

"However, when I woke up I had forgotten it. I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it. In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something . . ."

So the story itself is gone, if it ever was there. Aira knows it’s pointless to try to remember, but he resists letting it go “and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself.” Aira goes on to explain how this “taking control of forgetting” is “consistent with my theory of literature.” He expresses a perhaps hypocritical disdain for writers who rely on memory and says, “Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful.”

Which leads Aira to a childhood memory that has its moment of loss and forgetting. He is playing with his friend Omar near a truck’s trailer. Aira is startled to find his friend has disappeared. He’s shocked. Omar was there and now he is not. Aira wanders home and finds out that it is much later than he thinks. Everyone is, in fact, worried about him – he had disappeared, and now he cannot remember the afternoon. He has no idea what happened to that time (even now), but the fact that so much time has passed causes him even more anxiety. After all, he has arrived, and Omar is still missing: “It wasn’t me, they were wrong . . . it was Omar who’d disappeared! It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken. And now, I though in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling. I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.”

Omar’s mother is Delia Siffoni, the local seamstress. She’s working on a wedding dress for the pregnant school teacher when she hears Omar is missing. She freaks out, takes her sewing kit and the wedding dress, jumps in a car and tells it to go! She’s certain that her son is in that trailer and on his way to the abyss — Patagonia. “What else could she do?”

Now, this is where the story gets whacked, and I mean that as a technical term. Coming home to find his wife missing since she’s fled to find their missing son, Ramón Siffoni takes off too. And then someone else takes off after them, and it’s a mad race to Patagonia. There’s a wreck, flight, a monster child, and the wind eventually falls in love. To be frank, it was a bit magical and, for me, incoherent. That’s not to say it isn’t fun, but I admit that it left me a bit baffled at times, and not in a good way. It’s says a lot for the book, then, that I came away still feeling I’d been through something powerful.

There’s a moment with Delia: ”Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed. And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?” Indeed. Who is she? What is any of this? I don’t know if there is a symbolic meaning to the monster child or the wind or any other of the strange things we encounter in this book. But there’s the forgetting, the loss, and the chase, and Aira doesn’t leave those alone, and they become a powerful look at his own childhood experiences and, perhaps, into the Argentina of his childhood. What was threatening? What was forgotten? What was lost, that perhaps never was? I will close with a passage I loved from early in the book that I think shows that, despite the whimsy, Aira is talking here about something more serious. The passage shows peace, a near surety of peace, yet a peace threatened by something, perhaps only something imagined but that, imagined, is becoming real:

"How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related? A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us. Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction."

[Airácula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pero que librazo que te mandaste, Cesareco.

Sentí que estaba en una película de Bob Esponja. En una bellísima, graciosa e hilarante película de Bob Esponja.

Cada "capitulo" (de breves páginas) funde ensayo y narración literaria. Es tan divertido todo, tiene muchos puntos de encuentro con Boris Vian. Cosa rara, sí. Pero hay mucho de la Espuma de los día en La costurera y el viento, no por la trama sino por el elemento maravilloso que pobla muchas de las locuras y la belleza con la que Aira las escribe, sobre todo eso: hay una dulzura muy patente en todo el libro.

¿Qué sucede si el viento se enamora? es algo bueno o algo malo? y si se enamora de alguien que tú amas? La historia propone una desaparición siniestra, una persecución delirada, una búsqueda externa (que siempre es interna), hoteles abandonados, jugadores clandestinos, mujeres dormidas, monstruos, la familia Aira, un muñeco de nieve que le tiene pánico a la muerte, la costurera y el viento.

[Marwa Omari · Rating 2 out of 5]

De naaister en de wind heeft zonder twijfel een intrigerende schrijfstijl. De auteur schrijft het ter plekke, alsof wij als lezers getuige zijn van zijn improvisatie. Dat maakt het boek op momenten meeslepend, maar ook ontregelend.

Bovendien doet de auteur regelmatig aankondigingen of beloftes binnen het verhaal die hij vervolgens nooit inlost. Dat laat het boek, ondanks de oorspronkelijke belofte, soms onaf en onsamenhangend aanvoelen.

Ik kan oprecht genieten van magisch realisme, maar dit verhaal ging soms zo ver richting het absurde dat het me uit de betovering haalde.

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

En surrealistisk saga som känns som en påpiskad skrivövning berättaren behöver skriva färdigt, hur galen den än blir. Det här är min andra Aira-bok (de kom i Tranan-prenumerationen i februari) och förstår jag det rätt är det mer eller mindre så hans böcker fungerar: han bara kör, och utgår från sitt skrivande nu, ett metaplan/skrivdagbok som vävs in i texten. Det här gillar jag, och praktiserar i mitt eget skrivande, redan innan jag kände till Aira, så det var roligt att möta en artfrände även om det vi skriver om är vitt skilda från varandra. Men jag ser också hur det skulle kunna bli lite tjatigt i längden? Dock: en wild ride medan den pågår, en vild fantasi i kort format som gör den relativt lättslukad, lite som en episod av Tales from the dark side.
Mardrömslogik, och sagolika element (som en besjälad vind och en talande snögubbe, för att nämna några av de minst märkliga).

[May Fly · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And now it didn't really matter which way she went; if there was any apparition, anywhere, she'd go toward it. What alarmed her was the feeling that she was at the extreme end of caring: when she came out on the other side she would not change direction again. The night could, at a whim, become the kind of uniform desert that would invade her soul, and that possibility filled her with terror."

So here we have from an Argentinian author a comic novel, whimsical and chaotic, bearing with unseemly grace a pair of unwieldy standards: that of the Latin American magical realist novel and the self-referential postmodern one. Even if we readers take the unlikely and fantastical events of the novel's "plot" at face value, it's not as if we're ever allowed to forget César Aira is writing it all down essentially off the top of his head, because he often pops in to remind us of this, and of the circumstances of the cafe in which he is writing.

The result it that these characters do not seem to form and take up space on the page as characters normally would, but instead they occupy a hypothetical space in an authorial mind which is laid open to us, albeit a mind in which the young César is also present himself as a child loosely connected with the seamstress we follow into the desert of Patagonia. After all, in this hypothetical space anything is possible, which seems to mean that nothing is, really. Even the missing child that sets the story in motion is a carefully-maintained uncertainty.

Somehow, too, this unusual atmosphere lends a note of the horrific to the experiences of these characters, because the settings they inhabit are clearly mental, imagined, and thus mutable and ever-undulating. Their fates cannot be predicted, because the unreality of their being is fully on display, albeit juxtaposed with an ineffable fear that drives them and certifies the emotional truth of what they experience. In Aira's brief moments of absolute clarity, the horrific and the comical stand side by side, shake hands, and perhaps even deign to sit down together for a game of poker.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aira is one of the most consistently beguiling, delightful writers I've come across, and while maybe this isn't quite as completely brilliant as 'Scenes from the life of a landscape painter' it's still an utterly wonderful book. It feels more strictly surreal than his other work I've read (in so far as anything that is surreal is strictly so), the weird little narrative is beautifully grounded by his own faux childhood reminiscences and his incredible, world-warping musings about travel, adventure, meteorology, simultaneity and, of course, Patagonia. He blends rituals and humor together into something totally his own.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second Aira novel, read on a long day of plane trips. This has a wild set of conceits that fit into what we know of south american surrealism and absurdism, only without the long-windedness so common to Marquez, especially in his later books, and without much attempt at characterization. One of the features of the novel is the difficulty the narrator has in coming up with the novel's plot, and his attempts at getting the attention of a parisian waiter. You can see and feel the fun Aira had as he imagined and invented things that are best encountered as a surprise. Very, very enjoyable.

[Mariel Ollivier · Rating 5 out of 5]

La dirección del libro, así como el viento mismo, volátil. Escribiéndose sobre la marcha, de la manera más fresca, absurda y elocuente. Mi experiencia como lectora fue grata y lúdica, solté mis buenas carcajadas. La relación con los personajes se quedó, sin embargo, en la superficialidad. La interpretación de los acontecimientos no tiene una intención íntima ni profunda. Muy recomendable para quien busca sorprenderse y pasar un buen rato con un texto bien escrito.

[Bläckätare · Rating 5 out of 5]

The vortex is sucking you in, spinning you round and spewing you out somewhere out on the Patagonian plateau. Keep calm and ¡buena suerte! because there's no going back to the semblance of your former self :)

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whimsy combined with wisdom is how I would describe Aira's stories. This is especially true for 'The Seamstress and the Wind' which follows, amongst other things, the story of a child who goes missing in within an enormous and endless truck, his mother whose attempts to find him end up in her engaging in a romance with a chivalric wind and being pursued by a monstrous fetus hellbent on exacting its revenge on her. All of this takes place beneath the endless pink skies of Patagonia, the backdrop for the surreal misadventures of the characters;

"The constellations were reflected in the glass, and there was also a collection of butterflies smashed across it that the driver had not bothered to clean off. The little pieces of wing-pale blue, orange,yellow, all with a metallic brilliance that intensified the light from the sky-were stuck there by their phosphorescent gel, tracing out capricious shapes in which Delia, even in her distraction, recognised lambs, tiny cars, trees, profiles, even butterflies."

Beneath all of this lies an irreverent desire to parody all of the tropes of popular Latin American literature, from the grizzled truck driver oozing machismo, to the repressive housewife, yet beneath all of this lies a magic and brilliance beyond parody, a style of storytelling which transcends desire and a   homage to the imagination which is matched only by Aira's countryman Borges. 

[Elin Söderholm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nästan 5/5. Det här är berättarglädje utan dess like

[Olivier · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 / Doldwaas.

Het was een wonderlijk schouwspel, een ansichtkaart met eeuwigheidswaarde, canonieke cinema, een scène om nimmer te vergeten: zien hoe een gekke vrouw gek wordt. - pag 25

[Damián Lima · Rating 5 out of 5]

En el prólogo al libro Diez novelas de César Aira, Juan Pablo Villalobos comenta que antes de terminar su primera novela de Aira revoleó el libro contra la pared porque

sus niveles de inverosimilitud me habían exasperado y porque desdeñaba las normas de la "buena literatura".

Villalobos no aclara qué libro de Aira era, pero yo me arriesgo todo a que era este, La costurera y el viento. Es un libro para tirar contra la pared o para moririse de risa y amarlo. Si es lo primero que lees de Aira, probablemente lo revolees, tras dudar si lo escrito es en serio o en broma, aunque se nota desde la primera línea que es una tremenda joda, un gesto socarrón a favor del exceso, del absurdo y del inverosimil. Gran parte de la obra y la estética aireana pueden pensarse como una burla cósmica a la literatura, pero en esta novela, para decirlo mal y pronto, se va al carajo. Es la novela sin plan, sin idea, que parte de un título (absurdo, además) y busca escribirse sola, armarse a sí misma, llegar a algo desde la nada misma. Y el método no podría ser otro que la acumulación caótica de episodios sin sentido y de rupturas del verosimil. No es una novela inverosimil, sino una novela que se dedica específicamente a quebrar, y por lo tanto alterar, el verosimil todo el tiempo. Episodios delirantes, persecusiones hilarantes, accidentes que terminan con gente volando sin fin, un viento enamorado que habla, un ser apocalíptico producto de una violación llamado el Monstruo, una costurera que se mete adentro de un motor de camión, un tipo que contruye un vehículo a partir de un caparazón de gliptodonte. Dicho así, parecen boludeces, pero hay que leerlo a Aira para ver los niveles de absurdo y de genialidad a los que puede llegar un escritor cuando está dispuesto a romper todas las reglas.

[Zoe Tuck]

This was my fourth César Aira. I've read How I Became a Nun, Ghosts, and Varamo, and this was my least favorite. I'm not saying it's not worth reading, but if this had been the first I had encountered, I would have been much less receptive to Aira's "fuga hacia adelante" approach, which sounds messy when you try to describe it. Basically it seems as though Aira throws a few disparate elements bouncing around his head into the air, mixing high and low, theoretical and material, and from the way they fall, he creates a plot around them. Or vice versa. And via his skill, imagination, intelligence, and that x-factor, a coherent text emerges. It's a surreal coherence, but a coherence nonetheless. And this one just didn't click! But when you write that many books, you're sure to have a few misfires. I'm just curious about how this one in particular made it over into English, and into publication at New Directions before some of his other titles.

[Jinny Chung · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Life carries people to all kinds of distant places, and generally takes them to the most far flung, to the extremes, since there's no reason to slow its momentum before it's done. Further, always further... until there is no further anymore, and men rebound, and lie exposed to a climate, to a light... A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton."

Funny, nonsensical, but beautifully written. The story takes a shocking but magical turn three-quarters into the book, and leaves you breathless with its conclusion. When you pick it up, just know that some weird sh*t's gonna go down.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read all four of Aira's novels that have been translated into English (from the more than 80 he has so far published in Spanish; he's Argentine and was much admired by Roberto Bolano), and this is among the best. Absolutely unlike anything else. Extremely imaginative. May annoy some people by its wildness, but actually this is one of CA's more straightforward efforts. It may be about forgetting. It may be autobiographical. Aira's credo (typically *almost* incomprehensible): "Publish first, write later." I believe that by this he means to invoke his famous rule of never going back, never changing anything, just keep moving. A fascinating mind. Completely unique. I'd read anything by him.

U.S. writers are so imaginatively impoverished in comparison to people like Aira, Marias, Nadas, Murikami, that it is almost laughable. (No surprise there: U.S. culture, such as it was, died off long ago.)

[Trin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The more I read of César Aira, the less I feel I understand him. Ghosts was kind of surreal and creepy, and had some of the best scenes set in a supermarket that I have ever read (this is meant to be more of a compliment than it sounds). I liked The Literary Conference less, but it still had some audacious meta bits. This...I have no idea, man. But I think I'd rather be reading Javier Marias.