The Famous Magician

by César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translator)

A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'") strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires "My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least of our hero's problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the insufferable boor Ovando—"a complete loser" but a "man supremely full of Conceit was never less justified." And yet, is Ovando a master magician? Can he turn sugar cubes into pure gold? And can our protagonist decline the offer Ovando proposes granting him absolute power if the writer never in his life reads another book? And is his publisher also a great magician? And the writer's wife?



Only César Aira could have cooked up this witch's potion (and only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)—a brew bubbling over with the where does literature end and magic begin?

Genres: Fiction, Novella, Latin American, Short Stories, Contemporary, Magical Realism, Books About Books

65 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

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

[Jesse (JesseTheReader) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Randomly picked this up at the library. I was intrigued by the concept and I enjoyed the ideas that were brought up & the discussions that followed. It makes you question the choice you'd make if you were given this grand offer that comes with a sacrifice. I just felt like a majority of the story is built around our main character going back and forth on what his decision will be and while I loved some of the contemplations he had, it sort of fell into a boring place.

[Ulysse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do like a writer
Who like César Aira
Will not occupy too much space
Who out of a hat
Can pull—just like that—
A joker that once was an ace
An ace
A joker that once was an ace

There’s no need to worry
While reading this story
That you’ll miss your taxi or train
In just sixty pages
It won’t take you ages
To pack it away in your brain
Your brain
To pack it away in your brain

Take warning though friends
You’ll have reached the end
Before you can spell ‘macaroni’
And then will you wonder
When it is all over
If César was real or a phoney
A phoney
If César was real or a phoney

[Vesna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another classic Aira from the publisher New Directions - short (very short), genre-defying, semi-autofictional (well, you never know …), playful, meditative, surreal, real, with moments of the delirious that loop back into reality or the imagination of reality (again, you never know…). While not the most accessible introduction to Aira, despite its brevity, it’s a pure reading joy for his admirers and I am happy to count myself among them.

This time, through a magical plotless tale, Aira ruminates on the meaning of literature in the life of a writer as well as any avid reader. It’s also about the limitations of the conventional literary forms as vehicles for expressing both the thoughts and imagination.

It starts with a Mephistophelian offer from a character Ovando whom the aging narrator-writer occasionally meets in the neighborhood and local bookstores: to give up writing and reading in return for the all-encompassing power over everything. The offer is credible as Ovando immediately demonstrates his magical powers. To tell more than that would give away a spoiler, paradoxically so as the “story” is plotless (in its standard meaning) and, like some of his other writings, written as a fictional essay (or reverse). This quote strikes me to cogently distill several dilemmas that the narrator-writer (Aira?) faces in response to this bargain, which are magically interpolated into the flow of the story:

Everything was interrelated; or rather, everything was coming together, converging on a precipitous vertex, like an imperialist perspective. The sham magic that my novels had staged, and the real magic opening up before me. But also my possible conversion from novelist to essayist, and thirdly, and most importantly, my going on or giving up as a writer.

Though he is decidedly averse to novelistic plots, there is actually an ending to the story as a resolution to these dilemmas, but, characteristically for Aira, it’s unexpected and, moreover, open to different interpretations... :-)

My thanks to New Directions and Edelweiss for an ARC.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this book came in the post a year or so ago, it was a weird looking book. Hardback, oversized, glossy look, silver spine, mustard and teal cover. I had been sent into a spin. This first impression took me to childhood, a brand new hardback Asterix comic. I felt weird. And the font is large, too. At under 60 pages, it's a long story, not a novel.

As in all Aira's works, there is a theme, an area he chooses to write one of his continuous writing projects. he writes quickly, minimum editing. He starts and doesnt stop. this one is about writing and the imagination. Does the imagination have limits? Our narrator, perhaps it's the author, or a simulacra of the author, encounters a curmudgeon around the book market he likes to attend on a Sunday walk. This fellow, Ovenda, is annoying, worth avoiding, except our narrator doesn't avoid him. They go to a cafe where Ovenda offers a Faustian pact. Our narrator can learn the art of transforming objects, of controlling the laws of physics for one's own purposes. But, the narrator must give up two things: writing and reading literature.

Our narrator takes this seriously, goes on a little quest to work out what he should do. he has a week to decide. it's a big decision to live outside time and reality, with no limits. Even fiction has limits, the imagination can conjure up what it likes, but it has limits, too. Literature, perhaps doesn't - it keeps coming, endlessly in new forms, new authors, new ways with old ideas. Like all of us here there are more good books to read than we realise our time on earth allows.

That's that narrative, now, the discursive, thematic structure, the discussions about the world of reading and writing operates in parallel.

Magic could do anything: move object, transform them, make them appear and disappear, but always on the condition that that it remains itself, the same old Magic condemned to go on reusing its stale old power. Reading, on the other hand, was always going beyond itself, because it had nothing of its own; it ha what it had provisionally, on loan from the book, which kept changing. Reading's paradoxical weapon was passivity... surrender to a higher objectivity- that is, to the book.

Like many of Aira's works, they end in a surreal reverie, or perhaps they were a surreal reverie from the start.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers seek out fellow readers as much as they seek out books, though fellow readers are, alas, harder to find. So we hold on to them for life.

Which is a very fitting quote as The Famous Magician is the 3rd, for me, of the first 6 of the new New Directions Storybook collection, kindly sent to be by my Goodreads friend and fellow reader Wendy.

Created and curated by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, Storybook ND—our new series of slim hardcover fiction books—aims to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon. The series, beautifully designed by Peter Mendelsund, will feature original works by beloved New Directions authors, and will also introduce new writers to the list. As Alhadeff notes, “There’s nothing sweeter than to fall, for a few hours, between the covers of a perfect little book! And the image on the front, by a contemporary artist such as Francesco Clemente or Kiki Smith, will draw you in. Longer stories or shorter novels with a beautiful face: that’s Storybook ND.

The Famous Magician is Chris Andrews' translation of César Aira's 2013 original El ilustre mago.

Aira is ideally suited to this collection known for his prolific production of novellas, gradually being bought into English by New Directions.

And he ought to be an author I love, writing books of my ideal length (100 pages or less), deeply embedded in a love of books, and replete with literary references. But (sacrilige) I have yet to really click with his work, and perhaps his prolific output is a reason why - I prefer novellas that have been finely polished, the sort that suggest for many writers of long novels that they could have written a shorter one, but didn’t have the time. Whereas for Aira is abundant ideas lead to a rather different experience where for me, so far, the prose hasn't quite measured up.

The Famous Magician is narrated by an author. As the novel opens he is approached by a rather disreputable bookseller who convinces him, with demonstrations, he has magic powers and offers him a Faustian pact - induction into the bookseller’s magic but at the cost of renouncing writing. I say Faustian as this is an obvious literary reference, but the author himself recalls the strange relationship between Pessoa and the English occultist Aleister Crowley (see e.g. The Guardian from 2008).

The narrator isn't so much grabbed by the chance for infinite richers or other powers, as caused something of a crisis of confidence in the value of his own writing

Everything was interrelated, or rather, everything was coming together, converging on a precipitous vertex, like an imperialist perspective: the sham magic that my novels had staged, and the real magic opening up before me. But also my possible conversion from novelist to essayist, and thirdly, and most importantly, my going on or giving up as a writer. Nothing was decided; the alternatives formed parallel lines, appearing to converge but never touching.

And the story reaches an oddly fantastical end in Egypt.

3 stars - another 'not quite for me' from César Aira, but an author I will carry on sampling.

Note 1

The quote that opens my review continues:

Ernesto was my reading master; he had introduced me to many of the authors I had ended up plagiarising - Gobineau for example.

Given the book names real-life figures, such as Pessoa, I assume this is a reference to an actual author. But the only author of that name I know is Arthur de Gobineau, best known for his legitimisation of racism and creation of the concept of an Aryan Master Race. Which puts something of an interesting spin on the nature of the narrator and the story we're reading.

Put perhaps I am missing another author or the ficticious name is coincidental?

Note 2
The full collection is:
The English Understand Wool
Spadework for a Palace
Early Light
The Woman Who Killed the Fish
3 Streets
The Famous Magician

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Messing with the Magus
Review of the New Directions Storybook ND Hardcover (August 16, 2022) translated by Chris Andrews - translator from the Spanish language original El ilustre mago (2013)

I have never been able to understand how there can be bad writers. All the elements required for writing well are right there in Literature, served up on a silver platter. I can’t see the flaw in this reasoning, however I look at it, and yet overwhelming empirical evidence contradicts it.

A writer named César runs into a seedy secondhand bookseller who is a secret magician. The magician makes him a Faustian offer. In exchange for giving up writing and reading "Literature", he can become the magician's student and gain immense knowledge and power. César says he has to think about it.

He consults with some friends who demonstrate that the magician's powers are not unique. While procrastinating further on his decision he goes to a conference in Cairo, Egypt and considers asking his wife for help in deciding. The wife finally comes to his rescue.


The painting "Yellow Sail" (2010) by David Salle, a portion of which is cropped for the cover image of "The Famous Magician." Image sourced from David Salle Studio.

I quite enjoyed The Famous Magician which uses the world of literature as a metaphor for the world of magic. It is written in what I understand to be Aira's characteristic style of fuga hacia adelante {Spanish: flight forward] which moves the plot along in unconventional ways and concludes with an open ending.

Trivia and Links
Argentinean author César Aira (1949-) is extremely prolific with over 100 published works to his credit, mostly fictions of novella length. His most popular work (per GR ratings and reviews) is An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (English translation 2006) translated from the Spanish language original Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000).

The Famous Magician is part of publisher New Directions Storybook ND series which is:

Created and curated by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, Storybook ND—our new series of slim hardcover fiction books—aims to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon. The series, beautifully designed by Peter Mendelsund, will feature original works by beloved New Directions authors, and will also introduce new writers to the list. As Alhadeff notes, “There’s nothing sweeter than to fall, for a few hours, between the covers of a perfect little book! And the image on the front, by a contemporary artist such as Francesco Clemente or Kiki Smith, will draw you in. Longer stories or shorter novels with a beautiful face: that’s Storybook ND.”

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is from a new series from New Directions, Storybook, which claim to be, according to their website, slim hardback fiction that, ‘deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.’

I’ve some quibble with that, but first to the book..

I’m a huge Aira fan, more so of his horror and humour, but I admire everything I’ve read from him.
This fits more into his postmodern work, it’s playful, and although he never refers to himself, self-reflective. He offers up that he doesn’t write about himself as there are too many ‘painful scars’ he wants to forget. But he obviously does, as with this, and things like the wonderful The Literary Conference.
Here, after a bout of writer’s block, he wanders to the market and unsuccessfully avoids a meeting with the insufferable boor, Ovando, ‘a complete loser’.
They take coffee, and the writer’s opinion of Ovando is soon altered when he pulls off some impressive feats of magic, including turning a sugar cube into gold.

Offered the chance to learn the skills involved, the writer is told that he must give up literature. He has a choice to make.

Typical Aira in many ways; deranged, outrageous, quietly amusing and unputdownable.


Back to New Directions though.. their series of hardback fiction is only available in ebook at the moment. 48 pages for £6.50.. too much.
Put two of his short works together perhaps? Or lower the price.
I suspect at the moment the only people who will buy are fans of his like me.
It’s a pity, because there are several others in the series I would really like to read… in time, I guess, they will be reduced.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers seek out fellow readers as much as they seek out books, though fellow readers are, alas, more difficult to find. So we hold onto them for life.

“You said he would forbid you to read?”
“He says it’s a harmful activity.”
“Of course it is! That’s why we cherish it.”

[Bert Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Buenos Aires, a successful 60-year-old novelist meets a denizen of secondhand booksellers who presents himself as a magician able to transform realities. He makes a Faustian offer to teach the writer the dark arts, but only if he agrees to forever cease all writing and reading.

The proposition plays into the writer's juvenile wishes for omnipotence. Intrigued, he asks for one week to make his decision; during which time he consults with both a fellow reader and the publisher of his books. Both discredit this escapade, discouraging him, yet still the writer remains enticed. In the end, he consults his partner in life, his wife, who ultimately provides the answer.

An odd tale highlighting the gift of writing and reading. Consistent with so many of Aira's suppositions - winding stories which have an unreality almost fairy tale quality.

I have long been an admirer of his work (the last one I read was The Divorce which I also highly recommend).

This is an edition of Storybook ND (New Directions)-whose mission is: the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon.

Cesar Aira's, The Famous Magician, certainly fits the bill.

[Royce · Rating 3 out of 5]

whimsical

[jebrahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Once he had what he was after, he would dig a grave and find my corpse in it, waiting there ever since I'd written my first book, fourty years earlier. That way, no one could accuse him of murder."

ah, the wit and mind of César Aira is always a splendor!

after coming upon a collection of 8 ND Storybooks all at once, i've grown to become a fan of the thick silver lining of spines that they add to my bookshelf. the packaging is super cute: nostalgic storybook-sized and formated books (think high-end spoofing of Little Golden Books) that toute and deliver "the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon". and who doesn't feel like an afternoon passed in the act of both reading and completing a book was a day well-lived?

"The Famous Magician" presents the author's dilemma in jest and in all seriousness to the reader themself: would he- would you- give up reading and writing books in exchange for posession and skill with Magic? ... ... ... as ever, we are danced by Aira's ever-forward-moving, hummingbird-like, spontaneous, imaginative, cleverly and lithely impulsve stream-of-consciousness ... and it gets trippy ~

i won't give any plot away, but shall say that this one crescendos in climax at the end and wraps up quite magically to reveal itself as a love letter to his wife- sweetly, hilariously, casually so ("casually" because i imagine that it is a casual thing for Aira to roll out 60 page shorts daily, like a fish in water, with his wife never as far away from him as he may be in his own mind's fantasies).

~

"....yet I hadn't been able to stop vaguely imagining all the things I might possess(as Francisco and Ernesto had shown me) and I was ashamed of myself. But then I interrupted my moralizing to make at least a provisional list of luxury items I would be able to procure by transforming pebbles and tacks. And I couldn't think of a single one. .... This made me feel like a genuine wretch, partly because of my lack of imagination and partly because I was clinging to that lack." ... ...

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

but who wants to get high on metaphors?

ever the imaginative and playful composer, césar aira and his slim genre-jumping tales never fail to delight. in his latest, the famous magician (el ilustre mago), the argentine author tells the story of a certain aira-esque writer and the faustian bargain which, if accepted, demands he never read nor write another book ever again — in exchange for unbounded alchemical gifts and magical powers. as he contemplates, deliberates, and ruminates on whether he actually could give up literature forever, the beleaguered writer whisks himself away to cairo for a conference (allotting himself an additional week of indecision in the process)... where soon all things come to a head.

with nearly 20 books now in translation (not even a fifth of his total output!), aira is as consistent as he is prolific. while a reader may never know which realm aira's fiction will stray into next, it's always a place of ingenuity and impish abandon. may he bless us with another hundred yarns yet.

admittedly, magic could do anything: move objects, transform them, make them appear or disappear, but always on the condition that it remained itself, the same old magic condemned to go on reusing its stale old power. reading, on the other hand, was always going beyond itself, because it had nothing of its own; it had what it had provisionally, on loan from the book, which kept changing. reading's paradoxical weapon was passivity ("and don't give me that macho nonsense about the active, creative, or vengeful reader"), surrender to a higher objectivity—that is, to the book. in a growing library that objectivity was manifest as the magic of magics, including all the others as effects. magic properly so called was barely a cause, orphaned and astray.

*translated from the spanish by chris andrews (bolaño)

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read Conversations, I am now on a quest to read every Cesar Aira book that’s been translated into English. He is sui generis. Just love reading his words, falling into these worlds he creates, the blend of literature, physics, philosophy, magic, and fiction, with truths laid down throughout.

[sanyaa! · Rating 4 out of 5]

what is the difference between reality and surrealism…

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

César Aira's The Famous Magician is another delightful outing by the Argentinian master of what I call the Roomba Novelette. The first person narrator, who is none other than Cesar Aira himself, bumps into an acquaintance named Ovando who wants to partner with him in some magical enterprise. The only thing is, he has to give up reading and writing. Cesar is not quite so sure about this, even though Ovando turns a sugar cube at the cafe into gold. Cesar then visits two friends and tells them of his plight. Both perform magic tricks of their own, leaving Cesar even more uncertain.

Finally, he asks for a one week delay about making up his mind and goes to Egypt to a literary conference. He tries to find an Internet connection so that he can contact his wife, who is in Europe on a project, about what to do. In Egypt, he runs into none other than Ovando, with whom he visits an old sacred site. Suddenly, the building begins to collapse, and Ovando is in a bad way. Cesar is saved, because his wife suddenly shows up and saves him.

Logical, no?

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"-¿Me dijiste que te iba a prohibir leer?
- Dijo que es una actividad nociva.
-¡Vaya si lo es! Por eso es que la apreciamos tanto. "

Compré este mini libro en la Feria del Libro, en el stand de la Biblioteca Nacional. Había una máquina (antes expendedora de cigarillos) ahora acondicionada como expendedora de libros. Ponías tu monedita, elegías tu autor, y salía el pequeño libro en una cajita. Así y todo, a pesar de su tamaño es completamente legible a lo largo de sus 166 páginas.

Es la primera vez que leo a Aira, y como ya había leído sobre su obra, sabía en parte qué esperar y de verdad no me decepcionó.
Por momentos real, por momentos disparatado, no supe hasta último momento cuál iba a ser la respuesta del protagonista al ofrecimiento del Mago.

Puse mi frase favorita de este libro al comienzo de esta reseña. Leer, además de nocivo, podría ser adictivo también verdad? Qué peligro, y nosotros seguimos leyendo!

Seguramente leeré pronto otra obra de Aira.

[Dal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me costó muchísimo agarrarle la onda...me parece que lo voy a releer jajaj

[Guadalupe Battilana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simpático, pero poco más.

[Baz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Aira has been described as a “sui generis” writer who composes fiction that blends realism with surrealism and magical realism, someone who makes and merrily violates his own rules.

I’ve been wanting to read him for a while, wanting to immerse myself in his unpredictable worlds, listen to his offbeat voice, and I’m happy to say my first Aira was as weird and charming and playful and smart as I’d hoped.

The narrator, an established writer in his sixties, is approached one day while he’s out on a walk and is given a strange offer: he can have the powers of magic, but on the strict condition that he stop reading and writing and give up the world of literature forever. The story took me on a wonderfully bizarre ride as the narrator puzzled over the possibilities. His takes and thoughts on literature are totally off-kilter but they also, of course, somehow make total sense.

A radiant, effortlessly dazzling work of acrobatics, to be discovered and enjoyed by fans of other literary magicians like Calvino and Borges.

[maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

this felt waayyy longer than it actually was. what would you give up reading and writing for? i thought it was fun and interesting at the start but there was a lot of meandering and i got bored. thank you next

[T Davidovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never not fall in love with a book packed with philisophical sleights of hand. I will also never not fall in love with a book that not only meditates on, but also explicitly demonstrates the power of fiction. This little novella has both of those things. If I could give it six stars, I would.

Read if you like philosophy, magical realism in the style of Borges, and Faustian Bargains.

[Erica]

fun little faustian autofiction about literature written by one of its greatest wife guys. favorited

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 3 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEW: A deal with the writing devil.

[Jordan]

aún no creo que la ciudad natal de cesar aira se llama “coronel pringles” / still can’t believe cesar aira’s hometown is called “coronel pringles”

[Aloke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one with the gold sugar cube

Short but lots of meta fun

[Leonardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the prose exploring writing, writers and magic wholesome. A lot of annotations that I would like to revisit in the future

[Valentina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Los lectores buscamos lectores tanto como buscamos libros,los primeros, ay, más raros que los segundos

[Santiago]

Hermoso y pequeño rato con César Aira en su típico estilo de "fantasticidios" literarios.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute sorry about being so indecisive you can’t even be scammed correctly, also writing.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A philosophical fairytale?