Ema, la Cautiva

by César Aira

use scanned back cover

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Historical Fiction, Ebooks, Literary Fiction, Spanish Literature, Novels

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

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

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disturbed by this novel. Sometimes that can be a good thing. I'm not sure whether it is in this case, though.

Ema felt to me throughout, as I read, as a horrific embodiment of a male fantasy. Ema is an ever-youthful, ever-desirable female who is subject to terrible violence (along with her children being subject to it) without her having much of a problem with it. She just passively makes the best of things. Because she is so passive about being carried off with regularity to be raped some more, then she doesn't really come across as a survivor who has agency, and her ultimate successes feel very pasted on, not believable.

The interstitial cuts to a male point of view throughout this novel all objectify Ema and focus on her sexual desirability, in ways where I'm simply not sure what to make of them--because the men raping her seem kind of reasonable and caring. The messages I'm getting from the text are garbled because I'm not confident that Aira is in command of the subtext, that this woman is a victim of serial torture. His writing dovetails too neatly with misogyny and male fantasy for me to trust that he knows what he's doing.

So one way to deal with this objectionable-ness is to separate my feeling about the book from any notion of author intent. If I do that, as an exercise in alternative interpretation, the novel becomes a deliberate farce, I guess, in a Candide-like way, of a character who decides she is in the best of all possible worlds. Or maybe the novel can be read as an indictment of men treating women like animals, or as a tribute to women's strength to overcome horrible abuse. If I try to shoehorn any of these interpretations into my own reaction to the novel, though, I'm still unable to resolve how such a completely passive character could ever survive and prosper.

The novel reminded me of the D.H. Lawrence short story "The Woman Who Road Away," a story of a woman who is as passive as Ema is about her fate, in a South American setting, but whose ultimate fate is a lot more believable, frankly, than Ema's:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400...

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book a week ago and have discussed it and mulled over it, and I guess I should just go ahead and write a review! The discussion and deep thinking have had a lot to do with questions of the author's intent. It is difficult to find many reviews in English of the work, in fact all of them are written by men who say nothing about the brutal sexual violence of the situations Ema finds herself in. One even went as far as saying that Aira is describing an "idealized" world that he wished he could return to. I suspect he is referring to the nature writing, but the complete omission of any discussion of the captivity element is troubling in every single "professional" review I read.

Ema, as far as we see her in the novel, moves from the captivity of prison to the captivity of kept sexual partner/housewife to the captivity of being taken by an indigenous group to the captivity of being traded as property between chiefs. At some point she seems to be semi-autonomous and returns to one of her previous residences. She raises pheasants, in captivity, and I got the sense that the author felt that by Ema taking another creature into captivity, she had regained control of her life and proved some kind of point.

Along the way, Ema gives birth to several children, that she continues to have to find ways to care for despite her living situation. They are present but as an afterthough. We only really see Ema's story as it relates to the activity important to the men, such as an ambush or a party or a battle. In important moments in Ema's life, the author doesn't give us any information. I kept asking why this was. Is he making a point that he is also keeping Ema as a captive, to only write about her in a way that interests him? Or is it merely that the author is writing this novel in Argentina in 1978 and this is just the view of women in that time? Is it a cultural oversight? Or is he saying something more? I actually am not sure, not at all. But the question continues to follow me. I am not satisfied to merely dismiss him as being male and oblivious. I am not satisfied to give him more credit, either.

One moment in the novel really made me pause and ask these questions. There is a sea creature, a whale I guess, that is killed and distributed. The men only discuss it through the lens of what they can get out of it - how many coats, etc. This is not unlike how they view women. Is this intentional? What is the point of this scene?

I think what captures most readers in this novel, something I haven't mentioned yet and should, is the beautiful, gorgeous writing. And of course this is a translation, so also I would like to commend the translator. The way he writes about nature is unforgettable, and while historical Argentinian landscape is not something I have any knowledge of, I feel as if I have visited at least three distinct regions of it just from reading this novel. Here is an example from the first third:

"One day, the song and the untidy flight of some gray birds heralded the first snowfall. The next morning, the fields and the domes of the forest were white, the sky looked like wet paper, and a marvelous silence stretched away in all directions. Carts left black tracks in the street. The children built snowmen and ran around yelling, crazy with joy. The character of the landscape changed entirely. The white accentuated the women’s dark luminosity. The hunters, painted red and black, stood out in the still panoramas. And the blue of the soldiers’ uniforms blinked in the snow, as if hesitating between obtrusiveness and invisibility.

The contemplation of the snows, of course, expanded leisure time. In the depths of the woods, fires were lit to warm groups of young people playing dice, or listening to the birds, or cuddling. The song of the cardinal passed into the languages of the whetted wind and journeyed all the way to the horizon. By night, the furtive call of the otter could be heard; and rabbits held the horses’ totalizing gaze with their superquick capering.”

For most of the people I discussed this novel with, the beautiful writing did not negate the other qualms. I know Aira has a very large body of work, 80-90 novels, and I think I want to try more to see how my opinion changes. I know many of his novels are not historical at all, and appear to be more experimental in tone.

[julieta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Solo había leído un libro de Aira, que me había gustado mucho, el de como me hice monja. Este me pareció aburrido, y eterno. Igual seguiré leyendo más libros suyos, estoy segura de que tiene mejores que este.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ema, "a delicate woman of indeterminate origins" as the back cover explains (she is considered white, although she is the same color as the Indian women, with either African or Indian features), is taken captive from somewhere and journeys across some part of wild Argentina in a wagon convoy with soldiers and other prisoners. The trip is ghastly, the prisoners barely fed, seeming barely human, the food noxious. When one male prisoner is seen copulating with "a being of indefinite sex," an officer cuts off his genitals and leaves the man hanging over the side of the wagon by the chain attached to his leg. He passes out and bleeds to death, his body left there for three days as the stench circulates.

Ema, who has an infant son with her, copulates with another officer. When they arrive at the fort which is their destination, she is given a husband, and also becomes a concubine, and also has dates in the woods with an Indian. She will have three more children rapidly over the course of the narrative. One night Indians attack the fort and its environs and Ema's husband disappears. She is taken to another area where again she serves as a concubine. In and out of harems is Ema. Does any of this bother her? It's hard to say. Aira doesn't say, and Ema's emotions aren't visible, except for a request she makes to be reunited with her lost son (at that point just a toddler), which is granted.

About 80% of the way through the novel, she decides to return to the fort (her current husband gives permission) and proposes her start-up to the commander: a pheasant-breeding farm. He gives her a loan and twenty thousand hectares and she begins the breeding, the descriptions of which are not pleasant (semen extraction and fertilization) and make even official visitors nauseated.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the novel was the large number of animal species, both normal and extremely odd, that pop up. I didn't make a list of them, but now I'm wishing I had as it would have distracted from the narrative's tedium.

The novel is befuddling. In their nonsensical way, the blurbs tend to agree: "His novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper, and everything happens at the speed of thought," opines The Millions. "You don't know where you are or what you are looking at, but the air is full of electricity." Someone in Artforum hazards, "Aira's literature is but a parody of inventiveness, and at its core is an amazing degree of penetrating and unrelenting critical reflexivity," which is most likely what I would have come up with too if I'd had a set of Magnetic Poetry.

Aira's Author's Note both clarifies and muddles, as when he calls the novel a "historiola." I don't know what that is but it seems precisely correct. He explains that he once worked as a translator of gothic novels, "odysseys in which the female protagonists - sometimes English, sometimes Californian - transported the same old entanglements over hymenoptical oceans, oceans of passionate tea." He continues, "Naturally, I enjoyed those books, but over time I came to feel that there were too many passions, canceling each out like air freshener." He then decided to write a "simplified" gothic novel, which this is. "...it turned out that Ema, my miniature self, had created a new passion for me, the passion for which all others can be exchanged, as money is exchanged for all things: indifference." This oddest of statements turns out to explain much.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I looked forward to reading this work, having very much enjoyed Argentinian writer Cesar Aira's work, How I Became a Nun. Ema the Captive is a much earlier work and I was curious to compare the two.

Ema the Captive is a very different type of book than How I Became a Nun. It takes place in 19th Century Argentina, out in the forests, plains, and mountains. The atmosphere is extremely dreamlike and the writing beautifully lyrical (although punctuated by episodes of shocking brutality). It begins with a march of Spanish soldiers with a glimpse of a captive woman who later turns out to be Ema. Although she is dark-skinned, Ema is for some reason regarded as white and therefore exotic amongst the other captives who are indigenous people. The rest of the book recounts Ema's life with the indigenous population.

With many books, I have the feeling half-way through that I have basically read the book and there are no surprises (other than with thrillers and mysteries where there is a punchline of sorts but the writing is still generally predictable). With Ema, I truly had no idea where the story was leading and what might happen. Apparently, Aira has said that he often writes without knowing where he is headed. I enjoyed the almost vertiginous feeling of endless possibilities. The writing is gorgeous with a dreamlike quality in the depiction of the life of the indigenous people and their surroundings.

Ema herself remains somewhat mysterious and undefined. If I had any criticism of the book, it would be how opaque her character is. But that, at the same time, gave me great pleasure.

I look forward to reading more of this writer's work. He is an important Argentinian voice, not so well known in this country who deserves to be read by many more people.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher New Directions, and the author for the opportunity to read this lovely book in exchange for an honest review.

[Elaine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read by Mr. Aira and all I can say is this book is akin to the Monkey Festival.

Inconclusive.

Ema, the Captive was an inconclusive read, filled with pseudo philosophical ramblings (from men, no less) about money and existence interspersed with plenty of scenes of smoking, gambling and lazing away your days.

Oh, and pheasant farming. Am I supposed to care about any of that?

The short read was less about Ema than about the strange, distant world she found herself living in.

She was mysterious only because Mr. Aira portrayed her in that way. She is distant, aloof and in a way, open to whatever life has meted out to her.

Life is always harsh and brutal for the fairer sex, most especially during a time of civil unrest and the political climate is shaky and uncertain.

It is no less hedonistic during Ema's captivity and the strange lives she lives in this novel of 230 pages but it was less about her survival, her fortitude and determination and more about the boring, typical, one dimensional men she is married off to, or meets on her journeys and their long winded, abstract monologues about associating money with life and money with proving one's existence or something like that, I really can't remember because I skipped the incoherent sermonic parts.

In the end, it all just sounded pretentious and boring.

Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to get it.

[Santiago Quijano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este es un libro extraño, como la mayoría de los libros de Aira. Maneja el idioma con maestría, sí, pero ¿es eso suficiente? Las atmósferas son increíbles, así como la ambigüedad de los personajes. Pero queda la sensación de que algo falta o que el autor es tan inteligente que a uno se le escapa algo que parece ser importante, la clave para acabar de entender finalmente lo que nos quiere decir.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"life," he said, "is a primitive phenomenon, destined to vanish entirely. but extinction is not and will not be sudden. if it were, we would not be here. destiny is what gives the incomplete and the open their aesthetic force. then it retires to the sky. destiny is a grand retiree. it has nothing to do with the human body's anxious perceiving, which is more kinesthetic than visual, or in any case more imaginary than real. destiny is concerned only with the flower, but the flower has no weight; we want the melon. the melon flower is like a little yellow-brown orchid. the vines of the melon spread over the ground chaotically, in a way that is not life-like at all. we're interested in things that have solidity and give, things that take up space, not conversations!"

the thirteenth of césar aira's works to be translated into english, ema, the captive (ema, la cautiva) is the prolific argentine writer's second book (completed in 1978 and first published in 1981). set in late 19th century argentina, aira's early novel is the tale of its titular character's travails through slavery, motherhood, and pheasant farming. though lacking much of the unconventionality (and extraordinary narrative shifts) that indelibly mark aira's later works, ema, the captive offers glimpses of his incipient style, with his burgeoning talents already well apparent. a boldness and strength of spirit imbues both the story as a whole and ema herself. while the strangeness that alights upon the pages of his most recent works doesn't pervade in this story, ema, the captive is, nonetheless, yet one more remarkable foray into the singular imagination of one of the spanish-speaking world's finest authors.

*translated from the spanish by chris andrews (aira & bolaño)

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

César Aira's Ema, the Captive is one of the odd Argentinian's finest works. We begin with a caravan of prisoners in wagons drawn by oxen headed to the settlement of Coronel Pringles, several hundred miles southeast of Buenos Aires. We see the strangeness that is Argentina -- indeed much stranger than it is in reality today -- from the point of view of a French engineer. We see miniature dogs that weigh just a few ounces each. There are massive snowstorms. (I don't think it ever snows in that part of Argentina.) We see a large herd of miniature seals that totally ignore the prisoners and their escort.

The viewpoint shifts from the Frenchman to one of the female prisoners, Ema, who is granted to him as a concubine. She then shacks up with a gaucho before a raid makes her a prisoner of various Indians. (This is before the massacre of Indians by the Argentinians euphemistically referred to as "The Conquest of the Desert.") Finally, she returns to Pringles and takes up a project of breeding pheasants. The novels ends abruptly when she and her Indian workers visit a series of caves near Bahia Blanca.

But then that is typical for Aira, the man who never explains and never backtracks. We never learn why Ema goes from one man to another. She just does.

There is a great deal of incongruous humor: The Indians are known largely for printing their own paper currency in any desired amount.

Strange as he may seem at times, I do believe Aira is the best of the living Argentinian authors, the inheritor of a literary tradition that goes back to Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Antonio di Benedetti, and Juan Jose Saer.

[Matthew Talamini · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a secret list of words that evoke vision. I should have added to it while reading this, because I kept going, "Oh, that's a good one!" Aira writes very beautifully. He makes Argentina seem like a fantastical dreamland, like Xanadu or Samarkand or El Dorado.

I think this might not be a novel, but rather a lengthy pastoral poem.

I think the key to the aesthetic of this book is that nobody in it ever needs anything. For instance, money is an important part of the book but nobody ever needs it. They smoke lots of cigarettes and drink from many different bottles, but nobody ever buys tobacco or alcohol. They hunt for food, or get it, without trading, from other people who have it. They live in houses because the houses are there, but sometimes not. Near the end Ema gets a loan to start a business, but the terms are 0.5 percent interest for 300 years; and she doesn't need the business, and her workers don't need jobs.

There are no diseases in this book. Even in situations where there really, really ought to be. There's one mention of a blind man, but I'll bet he was born that way.

It's mostly about "Indians", and its portrayal of them is deliberately fantastical in a way that seems to me to be more than half thought experiment; so now you know that.

Anyway, something is going on in this book and it's mysterious in the best way. Maybe the people are all actually pheasants. No really, I actually think that might be what the book is about. It's also possible that Ema was deeply traumatized prior to the start of the book and it's all one years-long dissociative episode characterized by emotional detachment. Those are my two best theories.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta novela es la primera publicada por César Aira, y según lo indica en su último renglón, fue terminada el 21 de octubre de 1978. La contratapa esta firmada por Aira, y es una buena prueba de la inteligencia y humor del autor. Empieza -la contratapa- con "Ameno lector:" y sí, bien puesto está el adjetivo. Esta lectura es esencialmente amena.

En cuanto a la novela todo es inverosímil. Pero no mientras se lee, mientras se lee la incredulidad se escapó por los desagues, y en el universo no hay nada más cierto que los soldados, los indios pintados, las cautivas, los faisanes, la nieve, los bosques, el desierto, el papel moneda, los dados y el humo de los cigarros. Mérito de Aira obviamente. Felicitaciones para él.
Entonces, ¿de qué se trata? Podría tratarse de la vida de Ema entre su primer y cuarto hijo. Pero no es Ema el tema central. Quizás de la vida de los indios; pero no es eso -además de ser esos indios por un lado fascinantes y por otro decididamente fantásticos-.

Esta novela es un canto edénico, es la calma descripción una utopía serena, es la enciclopedia de un universo fantástico, irreal, pero tan tan entrañable, que al pasar la última hoja nos dan ganas de llorar.

¿Qué más? La geografía, la botánica, la zoología, y todo lo que podría cotejarse contra el mundo real, contra la pobreza nuestra de cada día, no cierra ni pega. Es un universo construido con palabras, con libros y libros leídos. Y además, ¿a quién le importa que los indios cazen con flechas de bambú y beban sidra de loto, que midan en millas las distancias, que sean adictos a la adormidera, etcétera? Realmente es lo de menos.

La prosa es amena, exquisita, sencilla, clara. El tono es sereno, el grotesco y el disparate no tienen lugar. En cuanto al realismo mágico, no hay nada de eso a Dios gracias. Esta novela no le debe nada a nadie. Es original. ¿De donde habrá sacado César Aira esos indios mansos, esa naturaleza bienhechora?, no lo sé; pero vayan desde aquí hasta sus musas mi agradecimiento.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es el primer libro que leo de César Aira y cuánto lo admiro y lo quiero ya. Disfruté cada página, el mundo de Ema, siempre fresco, sobre un territorio nuevo, real y no, me puso a cuestionar la realidad circundante (la mía); así de intenso es su lenguaje: trastoca el pensamiento y sus alrededores.

Este libro a ratos parece histórico, luego fantástico, mítico, un génesis, es paisaje, melancolía, soledad, una leyenda... pero nunca es una sola cosa. También, claro está, es un viaje (para los personajes, para el lector).

El tema (uno de tantos) de la impresión de papel moneda entre los indios de la pampa argentina me movió a leer sobre la economía contemporánea. Que este libro, desde imágenes primitivas, te mueva a cuestionar el misterio de la economía actual revela una extraña virtud. Fuerte, eh.

Y no hay queja sobre la trama o los motivos. La misma novela se explica a las pocas páginas de haber comenzado: es la novela de un paisaje, del drama que hay en la imagen. La naturaleza nos ofrece cielos rojos con estrellas y relámpagos mientras las aves lo cruzan y abajo el indio fuma, ocioso, contemplando la existencia. A mí me basta y me sobra con eso, con el regalo-propuesta narrativa de ser y siempre buscar explicaciones pero no tenerlas. Muchos lectores se sentirán perdidos, dirán que no entendieron el texto: ¿y luego? ¿Eso qué importa?

Gracias, César. <3

[Carla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't know how I feel about this book. Ema, moves around from different "camps", and appears to be a captive, raped, and yet the author wants us to believe she's okay with this and that she's an independent woman who can move to other camps? men? when the mood suits her? I found it very confusing and demoralizing. I've never read anything written by this writer. If this is how he portrays women, how he normalizes them, then I don't know I'd read more. I did enjoy the descriptions of the flora, fauna, and sea.

[Matt Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite from aira that i've come across thus far. ostensibly, it's a straightforward western novel but over time his charateristic plot twists and philosophical wanderings are revealed. it's told with a meloncholic and almost magical beauty that often left me feeling somewhat disoriented.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fear some day I might run out of Aira to read. Fortunately, every time I turn around there seems to be another one.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading and rereading Wilde over the years, I note a fact that his panegyrists seem not even to have suspected: the elementary and demonstrable fact that Wilde is nearly always right.
—Jorge Luis Borges, "On Oscar Wilde" (trans. Esther Allen)

Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.
—Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"

I went to see Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant this weekend; I was surprised to discover that its villain, aside from various iterations of H. R. Giger's monstrous xenophallus, was Oscar Wilde: or rather, David, self-named for Michelangelo's sculpture, an android become an omni-cultured aesthete, cultivator of monstrous lifeforms for their own sakes, explicitly queer seducer. Condemning nature and himself artificial, spawning new life not through insemination but through the ideological organization of organic matter (including the forced insemination of others and the gender-disordering conversion of men into mothers, i.e., incubators for the aliens of the title), the film's antagonist is a flagrant allusion to the Wilde archetype: the Platonic idealist as dandiacal aesthete, sexual antinomian, threat to public order, and, eventually, martyr.

To emphasize the stakes of the conflict, David's victims are a crew of married couples on a mission to colonize a new planet (in a bathetic attempt to offset the film's homophobic deep structure, we are provided among the crew a gay-married couple). The film's emotional core is a scene wherein David attempts to seduce the crew's own android, Walter. Both played by Michael Fassbender, the scene, notable for the double entendres that had the frat bros in the audience cackling ("I'll do all the fingering," David says as he teaches Walter to play a pipe), evokes the Narcissus topos of gay male desire. The seduction, alas, fails, as we might have predicted from the two androids' verbal mannerism: Fassbender plays David in homage to Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter, all insinuatingly nasal cultivation, while he plays Walter with the exaggerated accent British actors always use when their characters are supposed to be salt-of-the-earth middle Americans.

The film seemingly pits family values against its queer Satan, who is more monstrous than the monsters he manipulates, and Scott and co. cynically deploy homophobia (and heterosexual titillation) to keep those frat bro ticket-buyers entertained; but I ultimately hesitate at the judgement that the film is homophobic. Who could demiurgic David represent if not the film's maker? Who does an artist watching the film have to identify with besides its maestro of mayhem, whether director Scott or Scott's surrogate droid? Family values, the "good" in good vs. evil, are colors on the palette (or tastes on the palate), but the artist—whether Oscar Wilde or Ridley Scott, David or myself—are in this for the excitement, beyond good and evil.

The laborer in the factory of popular culture cannot publicly advertise amoral aestheticism, however, or not for long, anyway. There is too much money at risk, too many constituencies to please, so values must be affirmed. Hence Alien: Covenant's plucky widow, its explicit protagonist, en route to fertilize the cosmos. Even a pop artist who does endorse aestheticism must eventually come back to hearth and home: witness the current public-spirited sorrow of poor Lana del Rey, once our nightingale of sexual nihilism, now so distressed over "tensions…rising over country lines" that she must ask, like a PTA or PSA mom, "What about all of these children?"

In "high culture"—or as Pierre Bourdieu calls it, the "field of restricted production"—you are allowed say, "Well, what about them? And who cares, anyway?" (Which vicious aloofness has this to recommend it: if you can recall being a child, you might remember that this was what you always wanted to say in the face of the adult world's furrowed brow.) Hence Wilde's theoretical essays and dialogues, which are forthright in their dismissal of extra-artistic interest from art; hence Borges's equanimity in contemplating the replacement of reality by fictions, the process he narrates again and again, which politico-moral critics try to recoup as a critique of totalitarianism, like trying to convince yourself that pornography is a moral warning against fornication or, as we now call it, objectification.

By a commodious vicus of recirculation, I return from Ridley Scott's interstellar jaunt to Argentina—not to Borges, but to his distinguished successor in his country's avant-garde, César Aira, who candidly tells an interviewer, "maybe all my work is a footnote to Borges" (maybe?). I justify the above digression—can you begin an essay with a digression?—with the statement that Aira's second novel, Ema, the Captive, now translated into English for the first time, tells the same story as Alien: Covenant, right down to the breeding motif (called by a character "sodomy incarnate"—i.e., queer reproduction). Though Aira wrote this book, according to its subscription, the year before the first Alien film's release, this coincidence is not exactly an accident, as both the avant-garde novel and the pop-culture film franchise are playing variations on the same coupling of narrative genres: the imperial romance with the gothic romance. Both narratives show colonizing missions derailed by inhuman assault. The difference is that Aira's audience is a minuscule fraction of Scott's, so he is allowed his indifference to public life—allowed, that is, to openly side with the inhuman.

Aira is an avant-garde writer whose rejection of traditional novelistic realism and psychology takes the form of a sort of surrealist automatic writing practice: he writes his novels forward, without planning, research, or revision, inventing as he goes. Ema, the Captive is my third Aira novel, and like the other two, its story is an allegorization of the pleasures and perils of this procedure. Like the other two I have read, Ema concludes that there is in fact no "forward" in this life, nor any separation of art from nature, just an interlocking set of gestures and processes, pursued by animal, vegetable, and mineral alike, in the making and remaking of the world.

Ema, the Captive has roughly four movements. It begins with a military caravan of white men and convicts as they cross the pampas to reach a distant European outpost in the wilds of nineteenth-century Argentina. The hero of this section is a French engineer named Duval who is gradually initiated into Aira's endorsement of procedure for its own sake:

But he cherished the hope that the task assigned to him would be all-encompassing and absorb his life entirely. He could not, in that state of mind, have found satisfaction in anything less sublime.

We meet the Ema of the title only in passing; she is a "white" convict caring for her child (though Aira mocks the arbitrariness of racial classification by noting that she does not at all look white but functions as white in both European and Indian racial economies because both groups wish her to be so for their own purposes).

She is eventually traded to the Indians, and the second movement details her experiences with her "husband" Gombo in a native settlement near a European fort, where she contemplates the colonel Espina's introduction of money into native society as a medium of pure and meaningless representation that somehow creates value (one character makes the analogy to art clear: "Money is an arbitrary construction, an element chosen purely for its effectiveness as a means of passing the time").

Their town is attacked by Indians from the frontier, however, and the third movement, mimicking the first, features Ema only as a side character as it details the languid, melancholy, Huysmans-like pleasure of prince Hual, on an island sojourn with his courtly retinue, including Ema. On this island, he delivers himself of beautifully nihilistic speeches—

"Life," he said, "is a primitive phenomenon, destined to vanish entirely. But extinction is not and will not be sudden. Destiny is what gives the incomplete and the open their aesthetic force."

—as the Indians pull a fish like a "very white woman" out of the water, thus certifying the universality of captivity.

In the fourth movement, Ema decides to take some control of her fate by breeding pheasants and thus participating in the complicated and interconnected economies of various Indian nations and the white colonizers—like Espina, like her creator, she too wishes to invent a self-replicating system of arbitrary values. This should not be read as a conventional triumph, however, but only Ema's own initiation into what the other characters, from Duval to Gombo to Hual to Espina, have come to understand: as Gombo tells Ema, "If it weren't impossible, life would be horrific." I take "impossible" to mean, paradoxically, both "unendurable" and "full of infinite potential."

That was the last and definitive lesson remaining for her to learn. Then everything fell into silence. There was no anabasis.

One could object all day long to this novel on political grounds, from its blasé depiction of the heroine's rape to its wholly fantastical portrayal of Native Americans, but this would be an external critique and so somewhat beside the novel's point (Wilde: "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming"), which is that all life is a skein of procedures stretched over the void. As this article explains, Aira wrote the novel under conditions of a fascist regime, so his apolitical styling was an evasion worth making. Aira anyway evades the usual stereotypes in pursuit of new ones: his victimized heroine is not the "strong female character" of captivity narratives celebrated from Mary Rowlandson to Ellen Ripley by a culture of imperialist feminism, but a novitiate in the aesthetic clerisy, while his Indians are not noble savages but, like Wilde's Japanese, a nation of exemplary artists:

Imitating them was like returning to the source. Elegance is a religious, perhaps even a mystical, quality. The aesthetics of polite society: an imperative departure from the human. […] But the Indians kept still; their sole occupation was hanging from the blue air like bats.

Ema, the Captive is short, but it took me a long time to read. Aira remarkably recreates the trance-like state of his benumbed characters as they contemplate the impossibility of everything. In Chris Andrews's translation, Aira's phantasmagoria comes to listless life, feverishly dreamy, grotesque and sexy, a genuine and difficult pleasure:

They realized that they were, by chance, about to witness the act of mating. The male could barely control his excitement. When he swam upside down, they saw two horns, one on either side of the anus, as long and thick as pencils, with sharp points. The female turned over: her anus was surrounded by bulbous rings of throbbing tissue. The creatures coupled and sank to the bottom. The water made their cries sound distant. They tumbled in ecstasy, still clamped together. A web of white threads spread out around them.

I recommend Ema, the Captive with reservations (it is slow; it is, in its way, didactic), but even the reservations are recommendations—it is as slow as its preponderant mood of entranced nihilism demands; what it propounds is the truth, or one mood or mode of truth, even if we are not usually permitted to admit that we find life meaningless and impossible. To repurpose a line from the novel, Aira's "words [stand] out beautifully against the ambient strangeness."

The complete severance of art from life—or the claim that life is art, which amounts to the same separation as it undoes the hierarchy that allows art to be understood as a representation of nature—is the logical terminus of the aesthetic, its becoming free, like the droid-bred alien that menaces the crew of the Covenant. Art is too powerful to remain at large, though; readers of my recent reviews, those on Georg Lukács and Gillian Rose, will know that I fully expect—and in some part of my divided psyche, I even welcome—a forced recapture of art to affirmative values. Maybe it has to be that way, even from the perspective of art's own interests: Aira is an end, not a beginning, and the paradox of aestheticist art, as I am always saying, is that it is less exciting than art that more urgently narrates the conflict of values. As he writes in this novel of an Indian ceremony, Aira's work "require[s] the maximum of attention while rendering attention futile." For now, though, we can say with Borges that Wilde was right whether we like it or not about art's separation from life, and learn to enjoy, along with Aira's text and Scott's subtext, the fact that we are all, in the end, equally alien, and that there is no known higher authority with whom we may covenant as we invent ourselves and our planet.

[Saturn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambientato nella Pampa argentina dell'800, il racconto di Ema comincia con un terribile viaggio nel deserto in direzione di un fortino di soldati, dove i prigionieri vengono deportati per il popolamento forzato del territorio indios. Qui le donne sono considerate al pari di merce e divengono oggetto di scambio fra soldati o coloni. Ema sembra adattarsi alla vita con una rassegnazione necessaria alla sopravvivenza cercando di ritagliarsi momenti di piacere. Ma un attacco di nativi al suo villaggio cambierà di nuovo la sua vita trasformandola in un viaggio quasi onirico tra i ricchi e selvaggi territori della Pampa al seguito di gruppi sempre diversi di indios. La vita con i nativi sembra offrirle sempre maggiore indipendenza finché, riconquistata la libertà, mette su un allevamento di fagiani. La storia nei suoi capitoli finali vede la descrizione di questo allevamento che nella sua spietata disumanità mi ha ricordato le pagine iniziali dei prigionieri in viaggio, perennemente chiusi in gabbia e fatti uscire per soddisfare le necessità e i bisogni dei soldati.
È un libro surreale e particolarissimo dove è necessario lasciarsi trasportare dalla scrittura semplice e vivida di César Aira per apprezzarne il valore letterario, dove non bisogna aspettarsi nulla di convenzionale né tantomeno il solito romanzo storico.

[Sebastian Uribe Díaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Oyéndola, creyó comprender por primera vez la melancolía, al comprender su vida. Los indios habían disuelto su infancia, habían caído sobre ella como el más hermoso de los espectáculos del cielo, habían sido ideas. Y ahora, después de tanto pensar, por delegación, en sus cabezas resplandecientes de plumas, tras los rostros bellamente pintados, supo que no eran artistas, sino el arte mismo, el fin último de la manía melancólica. La melancolía les enseñaba a caminar, y los llevaba muy lejos, al final de un camino. Y una vez allí, habían tenido el valor supremo de mirar de frente a la frivolidad, y la habían aspirado hasta el fondo de los pulmones».

[María Minnucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Los indios parecían encontrarse siempre en la calma que sigue a una tempestad del pensamiento. Por eso valía la pena observarlos, para aprender cómo un ser humano puede reponerse de una conmoción que no ha tenido lugar. En una civilización como la suya todo era sabiduría. Al imitarlos, uno crecía volver a las fuentes. La elegancia pertenece al orden religioso, quizás místico. La estética mundana, un apartamiento de lo humano, imperativo. Todo era sexualidad y amor"

[Deni · Rating 4 out of 5]

no me gusta Aira, esto es lo mejor que le leí. sigo esperando un libro de él que sea realmente digno de su renombre. le agradezco su trabajo con la poesía de Osvaldo Lamborghini que, como dice Milita Molina, con eso ya se ganó el cielo.

[Arlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of his better books. Or should I say one of his more lyrical books.

[Griffin Andolfatto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surprisingly dull! I had higher hopes

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a type of surreal Western in the mold of the likes of McCarthy and McMurty, a series of spectacular scenes as a wagon train travels through the Argentinian pampas in the 1800s. In the first half of the novel Ema is surviving amongst a group of prisoners travelling between Forts in dreadful conditions, many are barely alive.
But these often horrific scenes, reminiscent of Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, give way to a more gentle second half, as Ema manages to survive, with her baby, and takes charge of a type of battery pheasant farm.
From the violence of a frontier mentality to vivid descriptions of the nature encountered, this is a difficult novel to pin down, but nonetheless entertaining.
Aira himself is difficult to pin down, and currently my favourite author to read, just completely unpredictable. This was an early novel of his, published in 1981, and a rare foray into historic fiction, as was An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. There are some of his trademarks I am coming to recognise; a spinkle of horror, and an element of surreality but in his own style of quirk; oddness with a subtle blend of humour.
Not his best by some means, but as ever, great to read the ‘famous magician’.

[Parker]

Brutal and Pastoral in equal measure. Humorously anachronistic in technologies, philosophies, and economic attitudes, and dives wholly in the surrealist nature of the frontier. A plethora of nigh fantastical animals encountered, hunted, eaten in grisly detail.

An interesting contrast to the later work "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter", where the natives are an object of study. Here, we are thrust full bore into their liminal existence and interactions with outsiders.

[Nate Hawthorne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably closer to a 2.5. Couldn't really get into the book. It was interesting, but not captivating. Didn't really care about the characters either way.

[Lara · Rating 1 out of 5]

POCO BUENO !

Qué pena porque me lo había recomendado mi gran amiga María, en cuyo criterio tengo ciega fe. En el primer tercio dije, lo voy a dejar. La última vez que me obligué a terminar un libro tenía doce años. Desde entonces poca hostia: si no me gusta lo aparto. Y yo quise abandonar este libro, pero no tuve coño, porque fue María quien me lo dejó. ¡ Cesar Aira ! ¡ Importante , fundacional , precursor de Dalia Rosetti ! Eso me dijo, por lo que yo me propuse cabalmente metérmelo por mi culo. Y empieza bien. Página uno ¡ vaya estilo ! ¡ qué lentitud deliciosa ! página dos página tres página cuatro.... declive.... Aburrido & Carente de Interés. Pajas mentales. Apariencia de profundidad. Personajes superficiales. Llevaba mucho sin leer a un cishetero, será que tengo el cerebro lavado (limpio, pulcro, perfecto). Señalo las cosas que me han gustado: Me ha gustado la temática de "imprimir dinero". Me han gustado las descripciones de los indios. Su elegancia su estilo sus pinturas sus joyas. Pero sospecho que es colonial y etnocentrista. No es ese el problema, puedes ser misógino y colonial si hay un buen talento. Pero no es el caso. Una estrella. For a dollar drop a man.

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Esta novela es solo para completistas que quieren leer todo Aira. Esto es lo que pasa cuando se escribe sin plan, una novela aburridísima. Más grave aún que Aira diga que es una novela "gótica simplificada", porque, la verdad, nada que ver. Lo que es es una dilatada descripción de la vida sin propósito de la frontera argentina del siglo XIX. Los blancos beben, duermen, pasean. Los indios también. De vez en cuando hay un malón y se llevan las mujeres. Otras veces hacen de megáfono para que Aira haga de filosofo amateur, sin mucho éxito.

[Gloria Perez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó el libro , interesante imaginar el proceso del mestizaje y colonización en Argentina ; hubo momentos que sentí incómodo el libro , inconexo en el manejo de los personajes .

“La fugacidad de la vida es eterna”

“SI No Fuera IMPOSSIBLE la vida sería EsPANTOSA”

Novela naturalista , gótica simplificada pero exagerada, pasaje entre lo mágico y lo absurdo . Expresionista
“Juguetes literarios para adultos”.
Relato de la colonización en argentina , proceso de mestizaje entre migrantes e indígenas . Características de los indígenas , estilo de vida y personalidad : astutos , indecisos; morales , toman todo lo que la naturaleza les da. Bebedores , fumadores , despreocupados ( los hace más elegantes ).

Arte del dinero : llegada del dinero , Impresión de este sin control como un ARTE , “el vicio es la clave de la vida “- Los vicios son infinitos .

Animales famélicos , niños mujeres escuálidas solo procreando , militares corruptos, Indios al servicio de la clase alta ,
Descriptivo al detalle de las rutinas de los indígenas de la época de la colonia en Argentina : preparación de comidas, maquillaje de los indígenas , cuidado del cabello, armada de los cigarrillos , juegos de mesa, cacería, rituales de aseo ….. etc
Describe también las relaciones , el rol de las mujeres , la hilaridad que les produce el parto .

Describe exhibiciones de faisanes , similar a nuestras peleas de gallos .

-línea entre Ficción y realidad : múltiples puntos . Plantea el desecho de cada lector a “creer” lo que quiera . Es necesario desprenderse de la Historia para disfrutar el libro .

Descripciones de la naturaleza: paisajes, lagunas, amaneceres, ríos, mamíferos, peces,insectos …Menciona muchas aves: patos, codornices, cigüeñas , jilgueros , flamencos , golondrinas , cuervos, calandrias, cachila, cóndor, corcoroba, chaja, gavilán, cardenal, colibrí , faisanes dorados , negros, rojos ,loro, pavos, chochas, Martín pescador , ave fría , estornino ,

Personajes :
Duval
Teniente Lavalle
Espina: comandante ejercito, imprime y pone a circular dinero.
Emma: exconvicta
Gombo: soldado ,esposo de Ema
Francisco : hijo de Ema
Mampucumapuru: indio, amante de Ema
Hual: indio
Pincen: cacique poderoso
Evaristo Hugo : ministró cortesano , de quien EMA fue concubina
Bob : última pareja de Ema

[Laura Janeiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ante todo, si no fuera Aira le hubiera dado más estrellas, pero espero más de él. Diría que es injusto de mi parte.
Es una novela rara. Comienza como novela histórica y en algún momento parece derrapar y las referencias históricas empiezan a resultar extrañas, equivocadas, y en algún otro momento, personajes que pertenecen a los estratos sociales más bajos comienzan a comunicarse entre sí con un lenguaje propio de un literato, y luego presenta como propias de tribus bastante desorganizadas, elaboradísimas estructuras sociales, más propias de un imperio ubicado en un remoto pasado de un exótico país, y luego se presenta (sin ninguna indicación de que algo hubiera cambiado) como un capitalismo salvaje casi deshumanizaedo, para desembocar en un final sin final, donde el fin de la novela parece estar signado por la decisión de descansar de la protagonista, ahora presentada como una persona casi en busca de sentido para su existencia.

Cita del prólogo: Definida por su autor como «historiola» —mezcla de historia y fantasía— esta novela es un viaje al confín del desierto patagónico, pero no solamente un desplazamiento físico sino especialmente el pasaje a un mundo entre mágico y absurdo, donde desde una fría narrativa que simula ser antropológica se construye un universo de salvaje sensualidad, de comportamientos al mismo tiempo idílicos e inhumanos. Con el pretexto de una novela de frontera, Aira logra en la pasión de Ema lo que él mismo llama «una historia gótica simplificada»

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first chose to read Ema the Captive by César Aira, I did not have any idea what to expect. Aira was a new author to me, so I went in to the book with no former knowledge of writing style or subject matter.

Ema the Captive is a good book, it just isn't a style of writing that is my favorite. It wasn't until the end of the novel that I really felt that there was a purpose to the story being told of the main character. The beginning and end of the story were more cogent, but the middle of the story lost me. I am glad I stuck through it and finished the novel, as I was invested in what Ema's outcome was by that point, but I felt that I had to muddle through the middle.

The middle of the novel made more sense once I finished it, but I had to get through the middle obviously to make it to the end. The brunt of the novel seemed almost lackadaisical and without purpose. Others may appreciate this style, but I am a clear lines person, I like to see where the story is going or what the purpose is and I just didn't feel that with this novel. I wasn't sure what the author was trying to communicate to me by telling the story. It's a quick read for those interested, and a light read.

Disclaimer: I received this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review after completing the novel.