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La liebre / César Aira.
Clark, an English naturalist, roams the Argentine pampas in search of the most elusive and rare the Legibrian hare. The Indians he meets report recent sightings of the hare, but on further investigation, Clark finds in these sightings more than meets the eye. The Hare, the first novel by Cesar Aira to be translated into English, is a subtle reflection on love, language, and colonial dependency.
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First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
César Aira
260 books1,146 followersCésar 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.
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July 31, 2013
The review below is published in 3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/origin...
In the opening pages of César Aira’s The Hare, Juan Manuel de Rosas, known as The Restorer of the Laws when he ruled the Argentinean confederation in the 19th century, poses the question: “is it possible to penetrate someone else’s incongruity? One’s own or anyone else’s, it made no difference, as he saw it. Even the most outrageous fantasy created at both its extremes, that of excess and of lack, the incongruity on which daily life was based.”
Aira has written an extensive oeuvre, over 70 published books and counting, based on his own forays into the incongruities of daily life. Weaving together myriad influences, from great works of Latin American literature to B-movie monsters, from canonical works of philosophy, history, and science to dime store novels, Aira creates realities in which the fantastic and the mundane are linked. In an Aira novel, you can expect plots to wander and veer off course, because the resulting diversions are more engaging and relevant to Aira than any typical conclusion could ever be.
The Hare, which is the latest English translation of Aira’s fiction released by New Directions, is in some ways not the typical Aira novel. It is twice the length of many of his other novels. As a result, the pacing is not as fast, and the novel sometimes reads as tedious, Aira’s prose as strained. It also has an ending that ties up so many loose threads in such a short time that it is reminiscent of final scenes in B-movie mysteries. In spite of these flaws, The Hare rewards careful reading, both for the insights it provides into Aira’s sense of Argentina’s past, and for Aira’s interest in the power of stories and the continuum of human experiences.
The Hare’s protagonist is Clarke, an English naturalist and brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. Clarke has travelled to the Argentine pampas in search of the legendary Legibrerian Hare, which is rumored to fly as well as hop. He is accompanied by Gauna, a gaucho of few words who acts as his scout, and Carlos Alzaga Prior, a young, romantic artist, as well as by Repetido, a horse of almost supernatural abilities. It soon emerges that each member of this small group (yes, even the horse) has his own personal reasons for travelling into the interior, despite some concerns over hostile Indians and unforgiving terrain. Each is on a personal quest, each is, in a way, searching for his own origin myth.
This small band first travels to Salinas Grande, the pastoral home of the chieftain Cafulcurá and his tribe of Huilliches. In a smoke-filled tent, Clarke listens as Cafulcurá introduces him to Huilliche metaphysics:
“I myself have sought to convey similar ideas [as Darwin], but — and look what a strange case of transformation this is — I always did it by means of poetry. In matters like these, it’s important to win people’s belief. But in this particular case, it so happens that we Mapuche have no need to believe in anything, because we’ve always known that changes of this kind occur. It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. You may ask me how. . . . it’s simply a matter of seeing everything that is visible, without exception. And then if, as is obvious, everything is connected to everything else, how could the homogeneous and the heterogeneous not also be linked?”
This theme of continuity runs throughout The Hare . Aira explores it through the myths and philosophies of the Indians whom Clarke meets on his travels. It also emerges through Clarke’s own speculations based on his observations of the physical world:
“Clarke wondered if he was at the far end of the Indians’ bathing area. As he thought about it, he became curious to see what lay beyond. Considered as a line of water that dissected the plain, the stream was a homogeneous whole, whose attractions were interchangeable, but moving along it, it changed without changing, in direct proportion to the distance traveled.
“Clarke stood up and, just as he was, without shoes or trousers, walked on about a hundred yards. A different aspect of the stream and its banks presented itself to him, novel despite being vaguely predictable. It was a kind of reworking of the same elements: water, the riverbanks, trees, grass. Fascinated, he walked on further, in the midst of complete silence. All the charm of the place lay in its linear aspect, the way each of its segments was hidden from the previous one: the very opposite of what happened out on the open plain. As he had thought, there was no one around. Even the distant sounds of voices and noises he had heard from time to time on the little beach no longer reached him. The river was a series of secret chambers, following on from each other as in an Italian palace. As he crossed a number of “thresholds,” the mechanism of increasing distance led Clarke to feel he was entering a world of mystery, a self-contained nothingness that invoked the infinite.”
In this world, surprises and mysteries await along a continuum. Aira has envisioned interconnected worlds, almost like panels in a comic strip. They are connected, a person can travel from one to the other, and they allow for swings between the imaginary and mythic, and the physical and rational. Aira uses this construct to explore Argentina’s past, split between the mythic world of the Indians and the rational world of the white settlers. He conceives of the pampas as a blank canvas, described by Cafulcurá’s son Alvarito Reymacurá as a place of discontinuities, which the Mapuche Indians filled with continuities that they created themselves through the stories they told.
Clarke soon discovers from the shaman Mallén that Cafulcurá governs the Huilliche through stories and myths. Indeed, Cafulcurá’s power stems from his own origin myth, fantastic events that led to his being rescued after being kidnapped during his 35th birthday celebrations.
“Bear in mind that this incoherent old man, high on grass, who gave you all the rigmarole about the continuum, has for the past fifty years borne on his shoulders all the responsibility of governing an empire made up of a million souls scattered throughout the south of the continent, and has done, and will continue to do, a pretty good job. From his youth onward, Cafulcurá has worshipped simplicity and spontaneity. But one can’t help thinking, and as soon as one does, all simplicity goes to the devil….
“Which explains,” Mallén went on, “his consumption of hallucinogenic grasses, although I must admit it’s gone a bit far of late. He uses them to create images, which interact with words to create hieroglyphs, and consequently new meanings. Given the prismatic nature of our language, there is no better way of bringing out meaning, in other words, of governing. And also, given that his own personal standing is based on his position as a man-myth, how could he think in any other fashion? He’s looking for speed, speed at any cost, and so he turns to the imaginary, which is pure speed, oscillating acceleration, as against the fixed rhythm of language.”
When Cafulcurá suddenly disappears, a victim of an apparent kidnapping foretold by Huilliche myth, Clarke and his companions agree to travel in search of him. Clarke encounters two other groups of Indians who pose a stark contrast with the Huilliche: the European-influenced Vorogas, ruled by the chieftain Coliqueo, and a group of Indians living underground, ruled by the chieftain Pillán. In these passages, Aira echoes medieval and early modern European travel literature, where exotic peoples served as symbols for certain values. Each settlement represents a different way to live: the orderly lives of the Huilliche are supported by stories and myths; the Vorogas’ chaotic lives, driven by sex and greed, show the influence of the white settlers with whom they sometimes lived; and the underground tribe of Vorogas replace a violent life with one of indolence. In one scene, Clarke compares Coliqueo’s Vorogas with the Huilliches of Salinas Grande:
“The Vorogas looked exactly the same as the Huilliches, except that they spoke a different language; once out of earshot, this distinguishing feature naturally disappeared. And yet it was still there. Since in reality nothing is imperceptible, thought Clarke, the difference was absolute, and involved their entire appearance. And the difference could be summed up by saying that in Salinas Grandes the Indians lived outside life, whereas here they were inside it. He had landed directly in the realm of fable, which he had taken to be real; now he had to get used to the idea that this fable was merely an island in the ocean of normal life. Plebeian and westernized, the Vorogas were a reminder of the ordinary things in society. To be completely ordinary, all that was needed was for them to work. Of course, there was no danger of them making that sacrifice, not even for aesthetic reasons.”
Clarke’s speculations about the differences among the tribes resonate with 19th-century European preoccupations with classifying people as well as flora and fauna. However, where the Indians fall on the continuum of civilized to savage is different than many of Clarke’s peers might expect. Coliqueo’s Vorogas are the most corrupt because of their contact with white settlers. Myths and stories and superstitions form a stable basis for the lives of the Huilliches, who live in a clean, quiet, pastoral setting. In the end, Clarke learns the importance of cultural relativism, an anachronistic touch in a book set in the 19th century:
“He had to admit [Gauna’s tale] was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories which did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretative judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could then be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities. Of course, Clarke was not going to put himself to so much trouble . . . but he could swear, a priori, that apart from Gauna’s version, there must be an endless number of other possible stories. Moreover, between one story and another, even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a gap but a continuum. And the existence of such a continuum, which at that moment appeared to Clarke as an undeniable truth, created a natural multiplicity, of which Gauna’s story was shown to be merely one more example. But Clarke had no intention of telling Gauna this, because that would be to run the risk of no longer counting on his company. To Gauna, his story was not simply one among many, but the only one.”
Throughout his journeys, Clarke learns to value the power of origin myths – ones explaining the beginnings of an individual, a tribe, a nation, or, in the case of Darwin, a species. Aira incorporates elements from all these examples of origin myths, as well as from captivity narratives, family histories, and other stories told around campfires, read in published volumes, watched on a movie screen. The Hare is not a tightly constructed novel. Aira’s influences from myths and history swirl around the narrative, occasionally bumping into a scene from a Hollywood Western or a surreal hallucination. Aira, true to form, follows his diversions gleefully. However sloppy and – at times – tedious The Hare is, it is worth reading for Aira’s idiosyncratic explorations into the continuum of human existence.
In the opening pages of César Aira’s The Hare, Juan Manuel de Rosas, known as The Restorer of the Laws when he ruled the Argentinean confederation in the 19th century, poses the question: “is it possible to penetrate someone else’s incongruity? One’s own or anyone else’s, it made no difference, as he saw it. Even the most outrageous fantasy created at both its extremes, that of excess and of lack, the incongruity on which daily life was based.”
Aira has written an extensive oeuvre, over 70 published books and counting, based on his own forays into the incongruities of daily life. Weaving together myriad influences, from great works of Latin American literature to B-movie monsters, from canonical works of philosophy, history, and science to dime store novels, Aira creates realities in which the fantastic and the mundane are linked. In an Aira novel, you can expect plots to wander and veer off course, because the resulting diversions are more engaging and relevant to Aira than any typical conclusion could ever be.
The Hare, which is the latest English translation of Aira’s fiction released by New Directions, is in some ways not the typical Aira novel. It is twice the length of many of his other novels. As a result, the pacing is not as fast, and the novel sometimes reads as tedious, Aira’s prose as strained. It also has an ending that ties up so many loose threads in such a short time that it is reminiscent of final scenes in B-movie mysteries. In spite of these flaws, The Hare rewards careful reading, both for the insights it provides into Aira’s sense of Argentina’s past, and for Aira’s interest in the power of stories and the continuum of human experiences.
The Hare’s protagonist is Clarke, an English naturalist and brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. Clarke has travelled to the Argentine pampas in search of the legendary Legibrerian Hare, which is rumored to fly as well as hop. He is accompanied by Gauna, a gaucho of few words who acts as his scout, and Carlos Alzaga Prior, a young, romantic artist, as well as by Repetido, a horse of almost supernatural abilities. It soon emerges that each member of this small group (yes, even the horse) has his own personal reasons for travelling into the interior, despite some concerns over hostile Indians and unforgiving terrain. Each is on a personal quest, each is, in a way, searching for his own origin myth.
This small band first travels to Salinas Grande, the pastoral home of the chieftain Cafulcurá and his tribe of Huilliches. In a smoke-filled tent, Clarke listens as Cafulcurá introduces him to Huilliche metaphysics:
“I myself have sought to convey similar ideas [as Darwin], but — and look what a strange case of transformation this is — I always did it by means of poetry. In matters like these, it’s important to win people’s belief. But in this particular case, it so happens that we Mapuche have no need to believe in anything, because we’ve always known that changes of this kind occur. It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. You may ask me how. . . . it’s simply a matter of seeing everything that is visible, without exception. And then if, as is obvious, everything is connected to everything else, how could the homogeneous and the heterogeneous not also be linked?”
This theme of continuity runs throughout The Hare . Aira explores it through the myths and philosophies of the Indians whom Clarke meets on his travels. It also emerges through Clarke’s own speculations based on his observations of the physical world:
“Clarke wondered if he was at the far end of the Indians’ bathing area. As he thought about it, he became curious to see what lay beyond. Considered as a line of water that dissected the plain, the stream was a homogeneous whole, whose attractions were interchangeable, but moving along it, it changed without changing, in direct proportion to the distance traveled.
“Clarke stood up and, just as he was, without shoes or trousers, walked on about a hundred yards. A different aspect of the stream and its banks presented itself to him, novel despite being vaguely predictable. It was a kind of reworking of the same elements: water, the riverbanks, trees, grass. Fascinated, he walked on further, in the midst of complete silence. All the charm of the place lay in its linear aspect, the way each of its segments was hidden from the previous one: the very opposite of what happened out on the open plain. As he had thought, there was no one around. Even the distant sounds of voices and noises he had heard from time to time on the little beach no longer reached him. The river was a series of secret chambers, following on from each other as in an Italian palace. As he crossed a number of “thresholds,” the mechanism of increasing distance led Clarke to feel he was entering a world of mystery, a self-contained nothingness that invoked the infinite.”
In this world, surprises and mysteries await along a continuum. Aira has envisioned interconnected worlds, almost like panels in a comic strip. They are connected, a person can travel from one to the other, and they allow for swings between the imaginary and mythic, and the physical and rational. Aira uses this construct to explore Argentina’s past, split between the mythic world of the Indians and the rational world of the white settlers. He conceives of the pampas as a blank canvas, described by Cafulcurá’s son Alvarito Reymacurá as a place of discontinuities, which the Mapuche Indians filled with continuities that they created themselves through the stories they told.
Clarke soon discovers from the shaman Mallén that Cafulcurá governs the Huilliche through stories and myths. Indeed, Cafulcurá’s power stems from his own origin myth, fantastic events that led to his being rescued after being kidnapped during his 35th birthday celebrations.
“Bear in mind that this incoherent old man, high on grass, who gave you all the rigmarole about the continuum, has for the past fifty years borne on his shoulders all the responsibility of governing an empire made up of a million souls scattered throughout the south of the continent, and has done, and will continue to do, a pretty good job. From his youth onward, Cafulcurá has worshipped simplicity and spontaneity. But one can’t help thinking, and as soon as one does, all simplicity goes to the devil….
“Which explains,” Mallén went on, “his consumption of hallucinogenic grasses, although I must admit it’s gone a bit far of late. He uses them to create images, which interact with words to create hieroglyphs, and consequently new meanings. Given the prismatic nature of our language, there is no better way of bringing out meaning, in other words, of governing. And also, given that his own personal standing is based on his position as a man-myth, how could he think in any other fashion? He’s looking for speed, speed at any cost, and so he turns to the imaginary, which is pure speed, oscillating acceleration, as against the fixed rhythm of language.”
When Cafulcurá suddenly disappears, a victim of an apparent kidnapping foretold by Huilliche myth, Clarke and his companions agree to travel in search of him. Clarke encounters two other groups of Indians who pose a stark contrast with the Huilliche: the European-influenced Vorogas, ruled by the chieftain Coliqueo, and a group of Indians living underground, ruled by the chieftain Pillán. In these passages, Aira echoes medieval and early modern European travel literature, where exotic peoples served as symbols for certain values. Each settlement represents a different way to live: the orderly lives of the Huilliche are supported by stories and myths; the Vorogas’ chaotic lives, driven by sex and greed, show the influence of the white settlers with whom they sometimes lived; and the underground tribe of Vorogas replace a violent life with one of indolence. In one scene, Clarke compares Coliqueo’s Vorogas with the Huilliches of Salinas Grande:
“The Vorogas looked exactly the same as the Huilliches, except that they spoke a different language; once out of earshot, this distinguishing feature naturally disappeared. And yet it was still there. Since in reality nothing is imperceptible, thought Clarke, the difference was absolute, and involved their entire appearance. And the difference could be summed up by saying that in Salinas Grandes the Indians lived outside life, whereas here they were inside it. He had landed directly in the realm of fable, which he had taken to be real; now he had to get used to the idea that this fable was merely an island in the ocean of normal life. Plebeian and westernized, the Vorogas were a reminder of the ordinary things in society. To be completely ordinary, all that was needed was for them to work. Of course, there was no danger of them making that sacrifice, not even for aesthetic reasons.”
Clarke’s speculations about the differences among the tribes resonate with 19th-century European preoccupations with classifying people as well as flora and fauna. However, where the Indians fall on the continuum of civilized to savage is different than many of Clarke’s peers might expect. Coliqueo’s Vorogas are the most corrupt because of their contact with white settlers. Myths and stories and superstitions form a stable basis for the lives of the Huilliches, who live in a clean, quiet, pastoral setting. In the end, Clarke learns the importance of cultural relativism, an anachronistic touch in a book set in the 19th century:
“He had to admit [Gauna’s tale] was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories which did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretative judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could then be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities. Of course, Clarke was not going to put himself to so much trouble . . . but he could swear, a priori, that apart from Gauna’s version, there must be an endless number of other possible stories. Moreover, between one story and another, even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a gap but a continuum. And the existence of such a continuum, which at that moment appeared to Clarke as an undeniable truth, created a natural multiplicity, of which Gauna’s story was shown to be merely one more example. But Clarke had no intention of telling Gauna this, because that would be to run the risk of no longer counting on his company. To Gauna, his story was not simply one among many, but the only one.”
Throughout his journeys, Clarke learns to value the power of origin myths – ones explaining the beginnings of an individual, a tribe, a nation, or, in the case of Darwin, a species. Aira incorporates elements from all these examples of origin myths, as well as from captivity narratives, family histories, and other stories told around campfires, read in published volumes, watched on a movie screen. The Hare is not a tightly constructed novel. Aira’s influences from myths and history swirl around the narrative, occasionally bumping into a scene from a Hollywood Western or a surreal hallucination. Aira, true to form, follows his diversions gleefully. However sloppy and – at times – tedious The Hare is, it is worth reading for Aira’s idiosyncratic explorations into the continuum of human existence.
August 2, 2025
Aira satirizes the adventure novel: His protagonist Clarke is a British naturalist, the brother-in-law of Charles Darwin, who travels to Buenos Aires to do research on 21 Argentinian animal species. But after his arrival, he becomes obsessed with the Legibrerian Hare, a bunny that... flies? Or is that notion just the result of a wrong translation, an ambiguity of language? Together with young watercolor painter Carlos Alzaga Prior and his guide, gaucho Guana, he borrows a fantastical horse and heads South to find the mystical hare. On his journey, he gangs up with Indigenous Mapuche who promise to help him if he assists them in finding their leader who was ... abducted? Or is this also a misunderstanding? And what are the individual goals of Clarke's companions (including the horse)?
This is a novel about Victorian-era colonialism, the ambiguities of language, and Argentina as a nation, especially the tensions between its ethnic groups and the country's history. Clarke came a naturalist, he wanted to investigate animals, but he ends up working as a sociologist, trying to understand the people he encounters on his mission. He meets dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, his daughter Manuelita, and painter Prilidiano Pueyrredón, he learns about Calfucurá and life and mores in Argentinia in the 19th century.
Sure, there is also magical realism and the surreal / the absurd (it's Aira), but more prominently, this is a dialogue-heavy romp that mocks the adventure novel and the tale of the heroic adventurer, full of wicked descriptions and dry humor. The pacing is highly anti-intuitive, leaving less space for action and more for meandering back-and-forth of people trying to banter over cultural and language boundaries, often leaving everyone confused. Unfortunately, the witticisms are often less witty than they could be, and the meandering can be quite the challenge: This requires a reader who is willing to go with the flow and enjoys ideas on a sentence-level, not only in a larger composition, because that's how this story rolls. And while this is a very long text for Aira, the ending still feels like a rushed parody of a Victorian romance novel.
Meh, but Aira is still a great author.
You can listen to the podcast gang discussing the brand new German translation Der Hase here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
This is a novel about Victorian-era colonialism, the ambiguities of language, and Argentina as a nation, especially the tensions between its ethnic groups and the country's history. Clarke came a naturalist, he wanted to investigate animals, but he ends up working as a sociologist, trying to understand the people he encounters on his mission. He meets dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, his daughter Manuelita, and painter Prilidiano Pueyrredón, he learns about Calfucurá and life and mores in Argentinia in the 19th century.
Sure, there is also magical realism and the surreal / the absurd (it's Aira), but more prominently, this is a dialogue-heavy romp that mocks the adventure novel and the tale of the heroic adventurer, full of wicked descriptions and dry humor. The pacing is highly anti-intuitive, leaving less space for action and more for meandering back-and-forth of people trying to banter over cultural and language boundaries, often leaving everyone confused. Unfortunately, the witticisms are often less witty than they could be, and the meandering can be quite the challenge: This requires a reader who is willing to go with the flow and enjoys ideas on a sentence-level, not only in a larger composition, because that's how this story rolls. And while this is a very long text for Aira, the ending still feels like a rushed parody of a Victorian romance novel.
Meh, but Aira is still a great author.
You can listen to the podcast gang discussing the brand new German translation Der Hase here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
June 8, 2022
Más allá del horizonte
No podré superar la contratapa de esta novela que escribió Juan José Becerra donde habla de una telenovela gauchesca. La Liebre es un delirio hermoso. Un José Hernández meets Manuel Puig. Están los que pretenden demostrar que saben mucho sobre un tema y se toman todo con gravedad y los que efectivamente saben mucho y se lo toman con gracia. Aira es de los últimos. Acá los indios se visten de sport y se van a veranear a cierto recodo de un río. Todo va formando parte de un paisaje alucinante en este desierto fértil que es la pampa húmeda argentina. Si entrás en el juego, es muy disfrutable.
Hace poco tuitteé que nadie había leído la obra completa de Aira, incluyendo al propio Aira. Tiene quichicientas novelas publicadas, al ritmo tres por año. Yo leí apenas dos, ambas con ideas muy originales y divertidas. Me propongo leer algunas más que ya tengo en casa; "La guerra de los gimnasios" de la que Miqueridaesposa opinó al terminar si no sabía si había leído una bosta atómica o una genialidad fuera de su comprensión y "La villa". Cuando le den el Nobel voy a poder presumir que lo tengo un poco leído.
==
Si te gustan mis reseñas tal vez también te guste mi newsletter sobre libros que se llama "No se puede leer todo". Se pueden suscribir gratis, poniendo su mail en este link: eepurl.com/hbwz7v La encuentran en Twitter como @Nosepuedeleert1, en Instagram como @Nosepuedeleertodo y en Facebook.
Gracias, te espero
Sant
No podré superar la contratapa de esta novela que escribió Juan José Becerra donde habla de una telenovela gauchesca. La Liebre es un delirio hermoso. Un José Hernández meets Manuel Puig. Están los que pretenden demostrar que saben mucho sobre un tema y se toman todo con gravedad y los que efectivamente saben mucho y se lo toman con gracia. Aira es de los últimos. Acá los indios se visten de sport y se van a veranear a cierto recodo de un río. Todo va formando parte de un paisaje alucinante en este desierto fértil que es la pampa húmeda argentina. Si entrás en el juego, es muy disfrutable.
Hace poco tuitteé que nadie había leído la obra completa de Aira, incluyendo al propio Aira. Tiene quichicientas novelas publicadas, al ritmo tres por año. Yo leí apenas dos, ambas con ideas muy originales y divertidas. Me propongo leer algunas más que ya tengo en casa; "La guerra de los gimnasios" de la que Miqueridaesposa opinó al terminar si no sabía si había leído una bosta atómica o una genialidad fuera de su comprensión y "La villa". Cuando le den el Nobel voy a poder presumir que lo tengo un poco leído.
==
Si te gustan mis reseñas tal vez también te guste mi newsletter sobre libros que se llama "No se puede leer todo". Se pueden suscribir gratis, poniendo su mail en este link: eepurl.com/hbwz7v La encuentran en Twitter como @Nosepuedeleert1, en Instagram como @Nosepuedeleertodo y en Facebook.
Gracias, te espero
Sant
July 27, 2013
One reason that Aira is among my all-time favorite writers is the constant sense of adventure he provides. He has an uncanny way of keeping you in suspense in the unlikeliest scenarios. Quite often you can have no idea of where you are or where you are likely to go, because there are no known coordinates to the maps of his unusual creations. Even when the landscape is familar from other Aira stories, as the Argentine pampas in this book are reminiscent of that of 'The Seamstress and the Wind' and to a lesser extent 'An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter', there are still other elements which add a distinctly different perspective on the terrain. Perhaps this is because I've only been able to read those of his books which have been translated into English (of which this was apparently the first). I wonder how much else would be familiar if I was able to read more.
The hero of 'The Hare' is a complex character, an Englishman who is quite at home with the Indians of the plains. a naturalist in search of a legendary and rare creature which may or may not exist, in one form or another. One often gets the sense that Aira likes to begin a story with a few unrelated elements, and then keeps going and finds out for himself ,just as we do when we read it, what could possibly come of it all. Sometimes his books steer far away from their origin and never return. Others return to the initial scene with a vengeance (as with my favorite, still, How I Became a Nun). This one seems unique in that its ending is full of wonderful surprises, made even more fantastic by the roundabout, obscure and meandering trail that leads us there. It's not a perfect story, and often feels a bit flat, until the stirring and quite emotional conclusion. Along the way I sometimes felt as lost as the wanderer in the tale, a mysterious figure who hovers on the horizon, barely in sight now and then, but this is part of that same sense of adventure. It reminded me of times I have arrived in a foreign country, knowing practically nothing about where I was or how to get along, and the exhiliration that some kinds of confusion can bring about.
The hero of 'The Hare' is a complex character, an Englishman who is quite at home with the Indians of the plains. a naturalist in search of a legendary and rare creature which may or may not exist, in one form or another. One often gets the sense that Aira likes to begin a story with a few unrelated elements, and then keeps going and finds out for himself ,just as we do when we read it, what could possibly come of it all. Sometimes his books steer far away from their origin and never return. Others return to the initial scene with a vengeance (as with my favorite, still, How I Became a Nun). This one seems unique in that its ending is full of wonderful surprises, made even more fantastic by the roundabout, obscure and meandering trail that leads us there. It's not a perfect story, and often feels a bit flat, until the stirring and quite emotional conclusion. Along the way I sometimes felt as lost as the wanderer in the tale, a mysterious figure who hovers on the horizon, barely in sight now and then, but this is part of that same sense of adventure. It reminded me of times I have arrived in a foreign country, knowing practically nothing about where I was or how to get along, and the exhiliration that some kinds of confusion can bring about.
January 17, 2015
Como si hiciera falta una confirmación más de la maestría artística de César Aira, está La liebre. Había párrafos en que seguía el hilo como un niño en una montaña rusa: asustado, emocionado y seguro de llegar a buen puerto. Las imágenes de la Pampa son gloriosas (es bueno el análisis de Fermín Rodríguez en Un desierto para la nación. La escritura del vacío) y la trama de los personajes (que no se puede develar sin spoilers) no tiene desperdicio.
January 28, 2024
Heerlijk absurd. Ontspoort compleet naar het einde toe.
January 17, 2016
Prolegomena to César Aira
"The longer a book is, the less it is literature," the Argentinean novelist César Aira said in an interview. With this standard, The Hare (248 pages), Aira's longest fiction available in English, is presumably the least literary of the lot. The rest of his translated fictions are of novella length, from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (87 pages) to Ghosts (139 pages).
Brevity seems to be the general rule. The exceptions, as with The Hare, are rare. Brevity denotes focus. Spontaneous combustion of ideas. Short gestation of larvae. Fleeting span of attention. Quick entertainment. Literary lite. Aira's stories court all of these characteristics. Then briefly, without warning, they suddenly pull away from their encasing, take flight on newly-minted wings.
In addition to their compact form, a distinct quality of Aira’s works is their sharp turns of plot. His style is of the improvised sort. His narratives are digressive. They go off tangent. They leap quantum mechanically. The plots become entangled. This owes in part to the method of writing that Aira adopted for himself. He never edits his work, never plans ahead what he is going to write, and just writes whatever comes to mind. He calls it the el continuo ("continuum") or la huida hacia adelante ("forward movement").
It's not that everything on the page is drawn by random chance. It may be to some extent. It could be chance that spurred one to read a book and never look back again. Like what Roberto Bolaño said, once you start reading Aira, it will be hard to stop. Translators from the Spanish need to descend on the books like vultures. Seriously.
A third characteristic of Aira’s outputs is his ginormous number of books. To date, he has produced some xx books to his name. The exact quantity is now never known. But the average production is two books a year. (He is perhaps rivaled only in this department by James Patterson and his minions: Patterson clones.) Thankfully, these works have been slowly trickling down in English. The indie publisher New Directions, who brought out his last half dozen short books in translation, has acquired the rights to several more.
Yet another quality of Aira's experiments (for they are nothing but fictional experiments, pseudo-theoretical ventures, quick business deals, educated guesses, unfinished proofs, hypothetical tracts, to be tested by time and the reader's patience) is their diversity. His oeuvre is a mix of genres, from the low blow to high art. Aira's prose is not so much a hybrid animal but half man, half machine. A literary cyborg: half fiction, half machine. In a shelf devoted to Aira, the fault lines of sci-fi sit snug with a ghost story, memoir gone berserk, child psychology and psychopathology, architectural musings and unbuilt construction, cinematographic battle scenes, and stunning nature writing. He does pick out deliberately several elements from air to fire, like the last airbender.
We can add one more to these identification keys of an Aira book. Each novel, or novella, has a missing key that could perhaps (though sometimes it couldn't, however much budging) unlock the book's architecture. There is a "manual" embedded in the book that could at least approach the gate, if it can't be entered. How to push through the darkness, if one can't see the way. Read on or drop dead. The manual is what often comes in the form of digression. But the keys were also reported to be as inconspicuous as a harmless paragraph, a bent passage, sentence, or phrase. Each book has a purported key that may or may not fit the lock. Each book is probably a key. Only, the keyhole is blocked.
Which brings us to The Hare. It's set in the Argentine pampas sometime in the 19th century, after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, starring an English naturalist and several Mapuche Indians. I can't say I'm prepared for this. I can't say I was ever prepared for an Aira. The senses are trying to be vigilant for telltale triggers. Is it the obvious hare in the title? Will it build upon a wonky premise and progress into a psychedelic trip? As in How I Became a Nun, where a young child was poisoned by strawberry ice cream, an experience that marked her/him forever. As in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, where the artist was stranded by the force of nature and never recovered from the episode. As in Ghosts, where nude male ghosts frolic around a condominium building and never demanded for anything except for the one crucial thing. Or as in The Literary Conference, where a novelist-slash-Mad Scientist attempted a cloning experiment that resulted in something akin to a war of the worlds.
There's something autistic in all of these encounters. They induce a kind of epiphanic panic. Like the word epiphanic, they attract attention to themselves. Much more so when the author self-identifies with the main protagonist, as the young girl César Aira in How I Became a Nun, or as César the novelist-slash-Mad Scientist in The Literary Conference. Authorial presence is another aspect of Aira's fiction. A madcap presence.
La liebre is translated by Nick Caistor, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1995, and is out of print. Emblazoned on the front cover is the blurb "The Borges of the Pampas." Uh, okay. Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, puzzles: check. The comparison is perhaps more pronounced in terms of the two writers' blind adherence to innovation and form. Aira's acknowledged masters, however, are the "anti-literary" set of Manuel Puig, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Copi. Not to mention Marcel Duchamp.
The Hare is about an English naturalist/geographer Clarke who entered Mapuche Indian territory in Argentina to search for an elusive species of mammal, the Legibrerian Hare. Clarke is brother-in-law of a genius named Darwin (yes, the one). The story begins with Clarke consulting Rosas, the historical Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, "Restorer of the Laws" in the Argentine pampas, to inform him of his scientific expedition. Rosas lent Clarke a good horse and assisted him in finding a guide to the area. He was also asked to bring a young watercolor painter with him. Earlier, he also consulted another talented painter who refused to go with him. There are obviously shades of the artistes and their art here as in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.
When Clarke eventually arrived at the camps of the Mapuche, he had a guarded conversation with its chief, Cafulcurá. The kind of conversation that skirted the specifics and was more like a battle of wills. While fluent in the tribe's language, Clarke was aware that certain words have double meanings and he was cautious in what he says lest he offend the natives. He was sure that his mission to find the hare was suspect in the eyes of the Mapuche. Is that the reason why Cafulcurá spoke to him seemingly in circles? Suddenly, there was a commotion from outside the tent. Loud cries of a hare sighting were heard and Clarke went to investigate. A "white" hare was presumably spotted but it escaped and took flight in the air. The Indians, young and old, were still craning their necks looking at the sky. Clarke, like the reader of an Aira book, was gradually feeling that he was being had. We know it's hard to shake that feeling.
Here's a striking passage early in the book. Cafulcurá, the chief of the Mapuche, was talking to Clarke:
The Butterfly Effect
It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. The passage can be a clue to the novel's appropriation of scientific concepts: the "butterfly effect", evolution, and ecological connectivity.
In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that very slight differences in initial atmospheric conditions can produce very different weather forecast. This principle has been compared to a butterfly flapping its wings in one place (say, Buenos Aires) which can alter the subsequent weather pattern in a distant place (say, a tornado in Texas). This is a debated concept in the science of meteorology, though lately it has been adopted in the modeling of uncertainties in climate change scenarios. Cafulcurá continued:
Connectivity, the butterfly effect, and consequent change support the view of Aira's narrative continuum in the space-time. In terms of the theory of evolution, the initial conditions of the environment and other externalities determine the variation of species. The butterfly effect is a fitting model for Aira's texts. The initial conditions of the story are subtle determinants of next conditions, which themselves are the bases of the final conditions. Cafulcurá's digression ended thus:
Aira describes a certain kind of perturbation wherein the patterns within a chaotic system are not at first evident but later the alignment begins to show when the trajectory of the "secondary effect" is plotted. (The zigzag line of the animals' path makes me think of an unusual pictorial poem. I am reminded of Césarea Tinajero's poem, "Sión" in The Savage Detectives.) The idea of continuity/discontinuity was continued again when Clarke spoke to Cafulcurá's son, Reymacurá, who spoke to him in more candid fashion than his father, but no less contradictory.
The "irregular path" was referred to again when Clarke got lost while trying to locate the stream where the young painter under his care was bathing:
At the center of the concept of the butterfly effect is chaos theory which deals with how infinitesimal changes in certain variables can cause random effects in complex systems. As with similar insinuations in his short books, Aira may as well be describing his process of writing. The "storyline" usually plunges from one direction into another, abruptly taking a sideways route. Tiny shifts in the plot affect the overall emphasis of the story. The connect-the-dots approach teases out an overall pattern from the various images. The dots, however disparate, are transparently there, plotted as a course toward a certain destination, dotted as with i's. Only connect.
The question insists itself: What does the elusive hare signify? An unattainable treasure, or insight? Or simply the story's closure?
Early in the book, certain motifs already pile up. The double meaning of words in the Mapuche language reflects the delicate relations between the native and the outsider. Where 'government' also means 'path' and where 'right' and 'left' are signified by other words, the communication gap is asking for things to fall apart. The Mapuche word for 'law' itself could mean many things, more than six things in fact, that the difficulty of establishing a common law must be evident. The squinting eyes of the Mapuche (i.e., double vision), which had been mentioned several times so far and also caricatured in the cover of the book, could also be correlated to the double meaning of words. The characters were seeing double, not deigning to separate one image from the other, the real thing from its shadow or artifice or ghost.
The Airaesque
Aira's brief books are very open to critical analysis, which makes them slippery and at the same time challenging reads. Aira is an open interpretation and an open-ended phenomenon. He himself is discovering the limits of narrative stability where realistic representations don't bleed too much on surrealism and whose footing in the fantastic is sure and confident. It's hard to dismiss Aira's unpolished philosophical ideas, not least because they are bound in words of poetry and they are theories-in-progress. There is a searching tone to his character's odysseys.
The long book at hand is already replete with double-edged words and double vision that arise out of the characters' voluntary choice to say or see things the way they want to. In other words, out of a writer's resistance to conform to simple narrative itineraries. I was waiting for the moment when the apparently sideways story align itself and open up to many-worlds interpretations. Or the other way around: when a linear story begins to branch out and go haywire. Early in the book a kidnapping incident took place in the middle of a hunting expedition. It looked like just the ticket to story's self-destruction.
"The Borges of the Pampas" may be better classified as its own genetic species, as The Aira of the Pampas. Let us call Aira's butterfly effect, for simplicity and in homage to another fictive insect – the metamorphosed bug or beetle – as the Airaesque. The Airaesque is characterized by an apparent disjuncture of the narrative, where events are disrupted to give way to quasi-philosophical digressions. The Airaesque is the deliberate and conscious flouting of logic and literary conventions. It is a representation of a literary search for meaning, without due regard for whatever methodical means are used to justify the obscene ends. Where the act of disruptive writing is a reflection of chaotic reading. The Airaesque is artistic gestation nipped at the precise point when the story is just about to escape absurdity, in order to re-enter absurdity. The Airaesque is the climax and ending that resist further epiphanies. The Airaesque is the obsessive-compulsive order.
One may encounter the Airaesque in delightful anguish. As Mallén, the Mapuche shaman, warns Clarke before telling him an apocryphal story: "By now we're in the realm of pure fiction, for which I apologise."
(First posted in a blog)
"The longer a book is, the less it is literature," the Argentinean novelist César Aira said in an interview. With this standard, The Hare (248 pages), Aira's longest fiction available in English, is presumably the least literary of the lot. The rest of his translated fictions are of novella length, from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (87 pages) to Ghosts (139 pages).
Brevity seems to be the general rule. The exceptions, as with The Hare, are rare. Brevity denotes focus. Spontaneous combustion of ideas. Short gestation of larvae. Fleeting span of attention. Quick entertainment. Literary lite. Aira's stories court all of these characteristics. Then briefly, without warning, they suddenly pull away from their encasing, take flight on newly-minted wings.
In addition to their compact form, a distinct quality of Aira’s works is their sharp turns of plot. His style is of the improvised sort. His narratives are digressive. They go off tangent. They leap quantum mechanically. The plots become entangled. This owes in part to the method of writing that Aira adopted for himself. He never edits his work, never plans ahead what he is going to write, and just writes whatever comes to mind. He calls it the el continuo ("continuum") or la huida hacia adelante ("forward movement").
It's not that everything on the page is drawn by random chance. It may be to some extent. It could be chance that spurred one to read a book and never look back again. Like what Roberto Bolaño said, once you start reading Aira, it will be hard to stop. Translators from the Spanish need to descend on the books like vultures. Seriously.
A third characteristic of Aira’s outputs is his ginormous number of books. To date, he has produced some xx books to his name. The exact quantity is now never known. But the average production is two books a year. (He is perhaps rivaled only in this department by James Patterson and his minions: Patterson clones.) Thankfully, these works have been slowly trickling down in English. The indie publisher New Directions, who brought out his last half dozen short books in translation, has acquired the rights to several more.
Yet another quality of Aira's experiments (for they are nothing but fictional experiments, pseudo-theoretical ventures, quick business deals, educated guesses, unfinished proofs, hypothetical tracts, to be tested by time and the reader's patience) is their diversity. His oeuvre is a mix of genres, from the low blow to high art. Aira's prose is not so much a hybrid animal but half man, half machine. A literary cyborg: half fiction, half machine. In a shelf devoted to Aira, the fault lines of sci-fi sit snug with a ghost story, memoir gone berserk, child psychology and psychopathology, architectural musings and unbuilt construction, cinematographic battle scenes, and stunning nature writing. He does pick out deliberately several elements from air to fire, like the last airbender.
We can add one more to these identification keys of an Aira book. Each novel, or novella, has a missing key that could perhaps (though sometimes it couldn't, however much budging) unlock the book's architecture. There is a "manual" embedded in the book that could at least approach the gate, if it can't be entered. How to push through the darkness, if one can't see the way. Read on or drop dead. The manual is what often comes in the form of digression. But the keys were also reported to be as inconspicuous as a harmless paragraph, a bent passage, sentence, or phrase. Each book has a purported key that may or may not fit the lock. Each book is probably a key. Only, the keyhole is blocked.
Which brings us to The Hare. It's set in the Argentine pampas sometime in the 19th century, after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, starring an English naturalist and several Mapuche Indians. I can't say I'm prepared for this. I can't say I was ever prepared for an Aira. The senses are trying to be vigilant for telltale triggers. Is it the obvious hare in the title? Will it build upon a wonky premise and progress into a psychedelic trip? As in How I Became a Nun, where a young child was poisoned by strawberry ice cream, an experience that marked her/him forever. As in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, where the artist was stranded by the force of nature and never recovered from the episode. As in Ghosts, where nude male ghosts frolic around a condominium building and never demanded for anything except for the one crucial thing. Or as in The Literary Conference, where a novelist-slash-Mad Scientist attempted a cloning experiment that resulted in something akin to a war of the worlds.
There's something autistic in all of these encounters. They induce a kind of epiphanic panic. Like the word epiphanic, they attract attention to themselves. Much more so when the author self-identifies with the main protagonist, as the young girl César Aira in How I Became a Nun, or as César the novelist-slash-Mad Scientist in The Literary Conference. Authorial presence is another aspect of Aira's fiction. A madcap presence.
La liebre is translated by Nick Caistor, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1995, and is out of print. Emblazoned on the front cover is the blurb "The Borges of the Pampas." Uh, okay. Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, puzzles: check. The comparison is perhaps more pronounced in terms of the two writers' blind adherence to innovation and form. Aira's acknowledged masters, however, are the "anti-literary" set of Manuel Puig, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Copi. Not to mention Marcel Duchamp.
The Hare is about an English naturalist/geographer Clarke who entered Mapuche Indian territory in Argentina to search for an elusive species of mammal, the Legibrerian Hare. Clarke is brother-in-law of a genius named Darwin (yes, the one). The story begins with Clarke consulting Rosas, the historical Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, "Restorer of the Laws" in the Argentine pampas, to inform him of his scientific expedition. Rosas lent Clarke a good horse and assisted him in finding a guide to the area. He was also asked to bring a young watercolor painter with him. Earlier, he also consulted another talented painter who refused to go with him. There are obviously shades of the artistes and their art here as in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.
When Clarke eventually arrived at the camps of the Mapuche, he had a guarded conversation with its chief, Cafulcurá. The kind of conversation that skirted the specifics and was more like a battle of wills. While fluent in the tribe's language, Clarke was aware that certain words have double meanings and he was cautious in what he says lest he offend the natives. He was sure that his mission to find the hare was suspect in the eyes of the Mapuche. Is that the reason why Cafulcurá spoke to him seemingly in circles? Suddenly, there was a commotion from outside the tent. Loud cries of a hare sighting were heard and Clarke went to investigate. A "white" hare was presumably spotted but it escaped and took flight in the air. The Indians, young and old, were still craning their necks looking at the sky. Clarke, like the reader of an Aira book, was gradually feeling that he was being had. We know it's hard to shake that feeling.
Here's a striking passage early in the book. Cafulcurá, the chief of the Mapuche, was talking to Clarke:
"I was just thinking," Cafulcurá said all of a sudden, "of what you were telling me. Your brother-in-law is a genius, there's no doubt of that. When I met him, I thought he was simply a likeable young man; but after what you've said, I'll have to change my judgement. Nothing unusual in that. But I should say: he's a genius in his own field. I myself have sought to convey similar ideas, but – and look what a strange case of transformation this is – I always did it by means of poetry. In matters like these, it's important to win people's belief. But in this particular case, it so happens that we Mapuche have no need to believe in anything, because we've always known that changes of this kind occur. It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. You may ask how. We explain it, or at least I explain it ..."
He paused for a while to consider how he did explain it.
The Butterfly Effect
It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. The passage can be a clue to the novel's appropriation of scientific concepts: the "butterfly effect", evolution, and ecological connectivity.
In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that very slight differences in initial atmospheric conditions can produce very different weather forecast. This principle has been compared to a butterfly flapping its wings in one place (say, Buenos Aires) which can alter the subsequent weather pattern in a distant place (say, a tornado in Texas). This is a debated concept in the science of meteorology, though lately it has been adopted in the modeling of uncertainties in climate change scenarios. Cafulcurá continued:
"It's simply a matter of seeing everything that is visible, without exception. And then if, as is obvious, everything is connected to everything else, how could the homogeneous and the heterogeneous not also be linked?"
In the Huilliche tongue, these last two nouns had several meanings. Clarke could not immediately decide how they were being used on this occasion, and asked for an explanation. He knew what he was letting himself in for, because the Indians could be especially labyrinthine in these delicate issues of semantics: their idea of the continuum prevented them from giving clear and precise definitions. On this occasion, however, his sacrifice has not been unrewarded, because Cafulcurá's digression, starting from the sense of "right" and "left" that the two words also had, ended thus:
Connectivity, the butterfly effect, and consequent change support the view of Aira's narrative continuum in the space-time. In terms of the theory of evolution, the initial conditions of the environment and other externalities determine the variation of species. The butterfly effect is a fitting model for Aira's texts. The initial conditions of the story are subtle determinants of next conditions, which themselves are the bases of the final conditions. Cafulcurá's digression ended thus:
"We have a word for 'government' which signifies, in addition to a whole range of other things, a 'path', but not just an ordinary path – the path that certain animals take when they leap in a zigzag fashion, if you follow me; although at the same time we ignore their deviations to the right and left, which due to a secondary effect of the trajectory end up of course not being deviations at all, but a particular kind of straight line."
Aira describes a certain kind of perturbation wherein the patterns within a chaotic system are not at first evident but later the alignment begins to show when the trajectory of the "secondary effect" is plotted. (The zigzag line of the animals' path makes me think of an unusual pictorial poem. I am reminded of Césarea Tinajero's poem, "Sión" in The Savage Detectives.) The idea of continuity/discontinuity was continued again when Clarke spoke to Cafulcurá's son, Reymacurá, who spoke to him in more candid fashion than his father, but no less contradictory.
The "irregular path" was referred to again when Clarke got lost while trying to locate the stream where the young painter under his care was bathing:
Getting there proved no easy matter. Apart from the fact that all the emotions and riding had left him with his head spinning and feeling drowsy with exhaustion (he had got used to a siesta, and it was exactly that time of day), he had no idea where this oasis was. The previous afternoon he had simply followed Gauna [his guide]. Now, on his own, every direction looked the same. Of course, in the absolute flatness of the salt pans, all he had to do was discover which direction to take – then the shortest route was obvious. But, as happens with every line, there were tiny deviations, and these inevitably produced far-reaching effects. In reality, on this plain, any one point was always elusive.
At the center of the concept of the butterfly effect is chaos theory which deals with how infinitesimal changes in certain variables can cause random effects in complex systems. As with similar insinuations in his short books, Aira may as well be describing his process of writing. The "storyline" usually plunges from one direction into another, abruptly taking a sideways route. Tiny shifts in the plot affect the overall emphasis of the story. The connect-the-dots approach teases out an overall pattern from the various images. The dots, however disparate, are transparently there, plotted as a course toward a certain destination, dotted as with i's. Only connect.
The question insists itself: What does the elusive hare signify? An unattainable treasure, or insight? Or simply the story's closure?
Early in the book, certain motifs already pile up. The double meaning of words in the Mapuche language reflects the delicate relations between the native and the outsider. Where 'government' also means 'path' and where 'right' and 'left' are signified by other words, the communication gap is asking for things to fall apart. The Mapuche word for 'law' itself could mean many things, more than six things in fact, that the difficulty of establishing a common law must be evident. The squinting eyes of the Mapuche (i.e., double vision), which had been mentioned several times so far and also caricatured in the cover of the book, could also be correlated to the double meaning of words. The characters were seeing double, not deigning to separate one image from the other, the real thing from its shadow or artifice or ghost.
The Airaesque
Aira's brief books are very open to critical analysis, which makes them slippery and at the same time challenging reads. Aira is an open interpretation and an open-ended phenomenon. He himself is discovering the limits of narrative stability where realistic representations don't bleed too much on surrealism and whose footing in the fantastic is sure and confident. It's hard to dismiss Aira's unpolished philosophical ideas, not least because they are bound in words of poetry and they are theories-in-progress. There is a searching tone to his character's odysseys.
The long book at hand is already replete with double-edged words and double vision that arise out of the characters' voluntary choice to say or see things the way they want to. In other words, out of a writer's resistance to conform to simple narrative itineraries. I was waiting for the moment when the apparently sideways story align itself and open up to many-worlds interpretations. Or the other way around: when a linear story begins to branch out and go haywire. Early in the book a kidnapping incident took place in the middle of a hunting expedition. It looked like just the ticket to story's self-destruction.
"The Borges of the Pampas" may be better classified as its own genetic species, as The Aira of the Pampas. Let us call Aira's butterfly effect, for simplicity and in homage to another fictive insect – the metamorphosed bug or beetle – as the Airaesque. The Airaesque is characterized by an apparent disjuncture of the narrative, where events are disrupted to give way to quasi-philosophical digressions. The Airaesque is the deliberate and conscious flouting of logic and literary conventions. It is a representation of a literary search for meaning, without due regard for whatever methodical means are used to justify the obscene ends. Where the act of disruptive writing is a reflection of chaotic reading. The Airaesque is artistic gestation nipped at the precise point when the story is just about to escape absurdity, in order to re-enter absurdity. The Airaesque is the climax and ending that resist further epiphanies. The Airaesque is the obsessive-compulsive order.
One may encounter the Airaesque in delightful anguish. As Mallén, the Mapuche shaman, warns Clarke before telling him an apocryphal story: "By now we're in the realm of pure fiction, for which I apologise."
(First posted in a blog)
June 12, 2017
Aira is a superstar in the literary world in South America. People from Chile and Argentina to Colombia and Mexico read him; by contrast in the U.S. he seems to be read only by a small number of people, and mostly in universities.
I wrote that sentence in 2008, but it remains mainly true. See my notes on Aira's Ghosts, Varamo, How I Became A Nun, The Seamstress and the Wind, The Literary Conference, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter--there's much more in those reviews.
This is not Aira's best book. How I Became a Nun is as wild and wonderful as novels ever get, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is just as good. This is a wide-screen, panoramic epic odyssey, and Aira has filled it with all sorts of set pieces: battle scenes, allegorical journeys, Pilgrim's Progress-style episodes, a visit to the underworld, and digressions into politics. A lot of this is the familiar machinery of nineteenth-century novels, borrowed from the familiar machinery of epics and earlier travel accounts. It's still wonderful, but Aira is occasionally one of the best writers in any language, and no one could guess that from most of this book.
I wrote that sentence in 2008, but it remains mainly true. See my notes on Aira's Ghosts, Varamo, How I Became A Nun, The Seamstress and the Wind, The Literary Conference, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter--there's much more in those reviews.
This is not Aira's best book. How I Became a Nun is as wild and wonderful as novels ever get, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is just as good. This is a wide-screen, panoramic epic odyssey, and Aira has filled it with all sorts of set pieces: battle scenes, allegorical journeys, Pilgrim's Progress-style episodes, a visit to the underworld, and digressions into politics. A lot of this is the familiar machinery of nineteenth-century novels, borrowed from the familiar machinery of epics and earlier travel accounts. It's still wonderful, but Aira is occasionally one of the best writers in any language, and no one could guess that from most of this book.
March 1, 2015
It is Argentina some time during the middle of the 19th century, during the Federalist dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. An English naturalist named Clarke visits Rosas and tells him of his quest to find a legendary flying hare, the Legibrerian Hare, somewhere in Indian country. Rosas gives him his blessing along with a horse named Repetido, a Gaucho named Gauno, and a young painter named Carlos Alzaga Prior.
From this neutral beginning, the fertile mind of César Aira takes control. The Mapuche and Tehuelche Indians the party encounters are curiously abstract thinkers who seem intent on misleading Clarke, while at the same time enlisting his aid to find a missing chief, or a duck egg with two yolks which give birth to twin ducks foretold to bring peace to the tribes of Patagonis. When told about the theories of Charles Darwin, the metaphysical Mapuche chief Cafulcura says:
That linkage of which Cafulcura speaks unifies what appears to be a wildly haphazard story as diffuse as the wild landscape in a wrapup that is delirious and, though straining the credibility, wildly entertaining.
Over the last three or four years, Cesar Aira has become one of my favorite authors. The Hare and The Seamstress and the Wind -- one the most recent Aira I have read, the other the first I read -- are both set in Patagonia, and together I consider his best works.
From this neutral beginning, the fertile mind of César Aira takes control. The Mapuche and Tehuelche Indians the party encounters are curiously abstract thinkers who seem intent on misleading Clarke, while at the same time enlisting his aid to find a missing chief, or a duck egg with two yolks which give birth to twin ducks foretold to bring peace to the tribes of Patagonis. When told about the theories of Charles Darwin, the metaphysical Mapuche chief Cafulcura says:
"[H]e's a genius in his own field. I myself have have sought to convey similar ideas, but -- and look what a strange case of transformation this is -- I always did it by means of poetry. In matters like these, it's important to win people's belief. But in this particular case, it so happens that we Mapuche have no need to believe in anything, because we've always known that changes of this kind occur. It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. You may ask me how. We explain it, or at least I explain it..."This long quote is, in many ways, the key to much of Aira's art. Appearing as it does near the beginning of The Hare, it's a clue to the going back and forth, across the deserts of Patagonia, over the Andes, all all over the vast landscape of the Southern Cone of Argentina.
He paused for a while to consider how he did explain it.
"...it's simply a matter of seeing everything that is visible, without exception. And if, as is obvious, everything is connected to everything else, how could the homogeneous and the heterogeneous not also be linked?"
That linkage of which Cafulcura speaks unifies what appears to be a wildly haphazard story as diffuse as the wild landscape in a wrapup that is delirious and, though straining the credibility, wildly entertaining.
Over the last three or four years, Cesar Aira has become one of my favorite authors. The Hare and The Seamstress and the Wind -- one the most recent Aira I have read, the other the first I read -- are both set in Patagonia, and together I consider his best works.
November 29, 2024
¡Pero!
Que novelón que te metiste, César.
Al principio sospechaba un remix pampeano de Nocturno hindú en esteroides aireanos, cosa graciosa porque ambas fueron escritas simultáneamente. ¡Pero No! Nada que ver.
En palabras de José Becerra, La Liebre es una "telenovela gauchesca".
Y vaya que lo es.
Por un lado tienes las vetas más borgeanas –termino fatigado pero útil–, con los laberintos, los espejos y los dobles. La repetición es una obsesión a lo largo de la obra, la repetición y el continúo; la vida se juega en la oscilación entre ambos.
Freud decía que la repetición es siniestra, Mr. Pringles se le ríe en la cara.
Por otro lado, es juego y chiste: la Pampa de Aira es irreal, pero sutil; los indios vestidos en sport que vacacionan; Cafulcurá y la semiosis de su lengua; Rosas haciendo abdominales y cabalgando al revés en su caballo llamado Repetido
La trama se sostiene por esos elementos telenovelísticos dramaticones que son chistes al reverso, pero los personajes son tan agradables que cuando llegas al final y se dan las mil y un revelaciones, una más operética que la otra, es lindo, te reís. No sentí –por primera vez– que me estuviera tomando el pelo, César. Sino que me estaba contando algo importante para él, sólo que se le olvidó a medio camino y ya después dejó de importar.
Que novelón que te metiste, César.
Al principio sospechaba un remix pampeano de Nocturno hindú en esteroides aireanos, cosa graciosa porque ambas fueron escritas simultáneamente. ¡Pero No! Nada que ver.
En palabras de José Becerra, La Liebre es una "telenovela gauchesca".
Y vaya que lo es.
Por un lado tienes las vetas más borgeanas –termino fatigado pero útil–, con los laberintos, los espejos y los dobles. La repetición es una obsesión a lo largo de la obra, la repetición y el continúo; la vida se juega en la oscilación entre ambos.
Freud decía que la repetición es siniestra, Mr. Pringles se le ríe en la cara.
Por otro lado, es juego y chiste: la Pampa de Aira es irreal, pero sutil; los indios vestidos en sport que vacacionan; Cafulcurá y la semiosis de su lengua; Rosas haciendo abdominales y cabalgando al revés en su caballo llamado Repetido
La trama se sostiene por esos elementos telenovelísticos dramaticones que son chistes al reverso, pero los personajes son tan agradables que cuando llegas al final y se dan las mil y un revelaciones, una más operética que la otra, es lindo, te reís. No sentí –por primera vez– que me estuviera tomando el pelo, César. Sino que me estaba contando algo importante para él, sólo que se le olvidó a medio camino y ya después dejó de importar.
August 11, 2013
If you like Borges and wish he'd written a novel, then you won't want to miss The Hare. Aira has done a masterful job in this Borgesian romp across the Argentinian Pampas in the nineteenth century. Replete with twins, labyrinths, underground passages, dreams, mysteries, knife fights, and all the other symbolism of the Borges short story, the novel creates a world that is down the rabbit hole. The narrative voice reminds me at times of Mark Twain, at other times of Chateaubriand, and always, of course, of Borges. The plot involves a journey of discovery and self discovery that begins as the hunt for an elusive and mysterious flying leporid, known as the Legibrerian Hare, and ends with a most improbable set of coincidences leading to a magical family reunion. Along the way, Aira plays with language and the multiple ways in which language influences our view of the world. Delightful, diverting, and thought provoking -- what more can one ask of a novel?
October 19, 2013
Ok, smarter people will see how this book ends once Clark, our English main character, tells his story a hundred pages in, but I didn't see the ending. So sue me.
The book is part Graham Greene, part epic quest, and part E. M. Forster. Our main hero, Clark, an English naturalist, gets roped into giving chase to someone who either has run away, been kidnapped, or just up and disappeared. There is numerous religious symbols, plenty of ruminations, and a lot of Graham Greene's version of "Stranger in a Strange Land."
There is a section near the end that my interest waned, but the end, that I probably should have seen coming, saved it, big time, for me.
Highly recommended.
The book is part Graham Greene, part epic quest, and part E. M. Forster. Our main hero, Clark, an English naturalist, gets roped into giving chase to someone who either has run away, been kidnapped, or just up and disappeared. There is numerous religious symbols, plenty of ruminations, and a lot of Graham Greene's version of "Stranger in a Strange Land."
There is a section near the end that my interest waned, but the end, that I probably should have seen coming, saved it, big time, for me.
Highly recommended.
January 15, 2016
An unbelievable romp through the plains and mountains of Argentina. A story of an Englishman searching for some Hare which is reported to fly when it is incapable of making an escape by running. It's a legend. Not a believable legend for the Englishman who seems just as interested in disproving - he is a naturalist, after all - as he is in discovering it. In the plot, he goes on many different adventures - one into a cavern, one into a war, one into a night-time raid, one onto a mountaintop. It isn't exactly clear why any of these adventures are of any importance, and this reader felt as though he was being strung along some underdeveloped storyline from the moment the Englishman naturalist left the first encampment in search of a kidnapped chiefdom. At times it was nice to be strung along. Even pleasant. Even entertaining. But it wasn't often enough to redeem this work. In the end it was unfulfilling.
November 28, 2023
Baudolinos del sur.
February 18, 2025
emmm wow? no esperaba que este libro me gustara tanto, tampoco me esperaba el final… fue fantástico, todo.
December 4, 2025
Qué paz mental ese final. ASMR
September 29, 2025
Brilliant story. Beautiful scene setting, natural and social imagery. A tale of accepting others and self as stars in a galaxy, moving through space and time in an endless dance. Everything is connected, and our judgements and beliefs, beyond that, are meaningless.
March 18, 2021
En la contratapa dice que "reina el humor sutil"; inevitablemente pienso que puede abundar en muchas cosas pero no en gracia. Error. El atractivo principal de esta novela es el humor sutil que reina campante hasta el final (con apoteosis incluida).
Como suele hacer Aira, no hay un intento de situar a los personajes en su sociedad histórica y geográfica. Aunque (es un hermoso caso de libertad creativa) cuando quiere sí; tampoco está atado a la fantasía, pero por ejemplo si los indios deben ser modelos de cortesía, lo serán. Y con gran coherencia. Pero también puede relatar una degüello de enorme verosimilitud. Y hacer a los indios andar espejados de grasa. Ojo, no es un disparate esta novela; o sí lo es, pero no en su coherencia interna, en su desarrollo y desenlace. Es una fantasía, el acto de un mago creativo y zumbón.
Se trata de una excursión a los indios rosistas, de un naturalista inglés, un joven acuarelista y un baqueano. Y todos son mucho más que eso.
Pero bueno, no importa tanto la trama porque podría decirse que es una sucesión de andanzas. Y lo importante es la prosa, amena, llena de gracia.
Y también valen oro los personajes, principales y secundarios; el capítulo de Rosas y Manuelita es de antología (está al inicio, donde casi siempre Aira da lo mejor de sí).
Como suele hacer Aira, no hay un intento de situar a los personajes en su sociedad histórica y geográfica. Aunque (es un hermoso caso de libertad creativa) cuando quiere sí; tampoco está atado a la fantasía, pero por ejemplo si los indios deben ser modelos de cortesía, lo serán. Y con gran coherencia. Pero también puede relatar una degüello de enorme verosimilitud. Y hacer a los indios andar espejados de grasa. Ojo, no es un disparate esta novela; o sí lo es, pero no en su coherencia interna, en su desarrollo y desenlace. Es una fantasía, el acto de un mago creativo y zumbón.
Se trata de una excursión a los indios rosistas, de un naturalista inglés, un joven acuarelista y un baqueano. Y todos son mucho más que eso.
Pero bueno, no importa tanto la trama porque podría decirse que es una sucesión de andanzas. Y lo importante es la prosa, amena, llena de gracia.
Salvo los guerreros que iban cerca de Cafulcurá, con unas chuzas larguísimas, los demás iban sin armas, de sport.
Y también valen oro los personajes, principales y secundarios; el capítulo de Rosas y Manuelita es de antología (está al inicio, donde casi siempre Aira da lo mejor de sí).
February 19, 2016
At some point in this relatively long book from Aira, the protagonist discovers that narration is superior to simultaneity. In Aira's story, narration plays at the centre - linking together many disjointed fables in an unrealistically fantastic climax. But it's not only in narration that this book excels - it also brings alive the beautiful Pampas, and subtly pokes fun at 'white supremacy' over native Indians, many times drawing a caricature of Indian's lack of direction and white man's methodical skills. In contrast, it shows the white man circling on the edge of Indian mystery, never able to understand the complexity of beliefs and relationships that govern the ancient tribes, but wanting to get in, become an insider.
What I like most, are the discussions between the three companions - who are so different from each other.
What I like most, are the discussions between the three companions - who are so different from each other.
July 20, 2014
Interesting meditations on colonialism, the western spirit in relation to indigenous worlds and a fantasy of their falling into each other, on war and warriors, on being in the pampas, magic and the destruction of magic, all in a mysterious meandering style of half tales and lies that build a narrative slowly.
A lot of people complain that this book is confusing or too sprawling. In their confusion they resemble the foolish Europeans of this book who expect to be told only the (most rational) truth. In their boredom they show their hatred for getting lost, for anything that doesn't immediately get to the point, that doesn't jump from one abstraction to the other. Please just keep scrolling if this is what you have come to expect of living.
A lot of people complain that this book is confusing or too sprawling. In their confusion they resemble the foolish Europeans of this book who expect to be told only the (most rational) truth. In their boredom they show their hatred for getting lost, for anything that doesn't immediately get to the point, that doesn't jump from one abstraction to the other. Please just keep scrolling if this is what you have come to expect of living.
July 19, 2012
I didn't exactly enjoy reading this. Thank goodness I got to read it with John Miles, because when we started putting it in the context of our Milliken Faculty Seminar it started to make sense to me. It was great to then discuss it in BsAs with Ariel Schettini. It was great fun to have things come together in terms of Argentina's complicated relationship with its indigenous population and the foundational myths that make up the cultural identity of a country. It was also interesting to discuss it in the context of Facundo and of the motif of La Cautiva. So, if you have a chance to put this in a context and discuss it with others I think it's interesting.
July 7, 2013
definitely one of this year's best pieces of fiction
August 29, 2013
the lord of the rings by césar aira?
March 16, 2019
I feel like this book was a prank played on me
May 10, 2024
This was Aira’s first novel, and having finished it I was interested in how it went down after it was first published. It was written in 1991, translated into English by Nick Caistor, one of his regular translators, in 1997. It was to be nine years until the next translation, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, so my guess is that it wasn’t received that well.
The Hare is his longest novel, and has quite a sprawling plot. It concerns a British expedition to a remote Mapuche Indian tribe led by Tom Clarke, a young naturalist and the brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. It takes place during the Federalist dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Its cast are of artists and outlaws, gun-toting bandit wives and a colourful group of natives. The 70 year old Mapuche chief disappears, and Clarke is co-opted into the search party for him.
The novel was reissued in 2013, after readers knew something about the author, and was much better appreciated. Fans of Aira (of which I am one) need a taste for the absurd, patience for his covertly philosophical tangents, and not being concerned with laughing at loud at seemingly inappropriate moments. He is prolific, writing 2 to 5 novels annually, amounting to more than 90 in total currently, and though the translations are a little behind the Argentinian timeline, they are catching up. The genres he writes in, from memoir, to horror, to historical fiction, are varied and often cross. It is impossible to predict where the story will go.
So, considering this, The Hare, having read a wide selection of his other work, it is much easier to appreciate its bizarreness - Clarke, searching for an mythical rabbit that not only jumps but flies, the two Argentinians that ride alongside him, a verbose 15 year old and a reticent gaucho with his own reasons for tagging along. Clarke gets more and more involved with tribal politics, so much so that he is declared their commander, and the day after, war breaks out.
Typical of Aira is that the plot is not to be taken seriously. Clarke’s journey through the pampas resembles editions of Star Trek, lengthy rides through desert landscapes interrupted by meetings with extraordinary grotesques; one tribe live for sex alone, another barter coal for strong alcohol, another speak only in ‘monstrous sentences’ intended to be incomprehensible. Clarke seems to revel in this company, his strategy to win the war is called the ‘Great Sine Curve of the Mapuche armies, a line that would have exploded the maps if anyone had tried to trace it’.
With hindsight, I can see why Aira keeps his novels short. There’s something of an overland of eccentricity here. It’s a bit much to take in, especially if this was the first Aira novel one read. It’s also a bit light on humour.
But great writers need to start somewhere, and this is entertaining and very definitely bears many of the trademarks readers were to go on to enjoy so much.
The Hare is his longest novel, and has quite a sprawling plot. It concerns a British expedition to a remote Mapuche Indian tribe led by Tom Clarke, a young naturalist and the brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. It takes place during the Federalist dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Its cast are of artists and outlaws, gun-toting bandit wives and a colourful group of natives. The 70 year old Mapuche chief disappears, and Clarke is co-opted into the search party for him.
The novel was reissued in 2013, after readers knew something about the author, and was much better appreciated. Fans of Aira (of which I am one) need a taste for the absurd, patience for his covertly philosophical tangents, and not being concerned with laughing at loud at seemingly inappropriate moments. He is prolific, writing 2 to 5 novels annually, amounting to more than 90 in total currently, and though the translations are a little behind the Argentinian timeline, they are catching up. The genres he writes in, from memoir, to horror, to historical fiction, are varied and often cross. It is impossible to predict where the story will go.
So, considering this, The Hare, having read a wide selection of his other work, it is much easier to appreciate its bizarreness - Clarke, searching for an mythical rabbit that not only jumps but flies, the two Argentinians that ride alongside him, a verbose 15 year old and a reticent gaucho with his own reasons for tagging along. Clarke gets more and more involved with tribal politics, so much so that he is declared their commander, and the day after, war breaks out.
Typical of Aira is that the plot is not to be taken seriously. Clarke’s journey through the pampas resembles editions of Star Trek, lengthy rides through desert landscapes interrupted by meetings with extraordinary grotesques; one tribe live for sex alone, another barter coal for strong alcohol, another speak only in ‘monstrous sentences’ intended to be incomprehensible. Clarke seems to revel in this company, his strategy to win the war is called the ‘Great Sine Curve of the Mapuche armies, a line that would have exploded the maps if anyone had tried to trace it’.
With hindsight, I can see why Aira keeps his novels short. There’s something of an overland of eccentricity here. It’s a bit much to take in, especially if this was the first Aira novel one read. It’s also a bit light on humour.
But great writers need to start somewhere, and this is entertaining and very definitely bears many of the trademarks readers were to go on to enjoy so much.
March 3, 2024
La mejor novela que leí desde Los Detectives Salvajes, encima venía de leer algunas medio pelo así que necesitaba urgente algo bueno en serio.
Ya me intrigaba hace tiempo la mística alrededor de Aira y su interminable cantidad de novelas, y la ridiculez de la escena con la que arranca La Liebre (Juan Manuel de Rosas haciendo abdominales en su oficina después de despertar de una pesadilla) me hizo inclinarme por ésta. La elegancia con la que escribe Aira ya alcanza, pero encima tiene mucho humor, personajes carismáticos, una imaginación increíble; y esos estiletazos medio metafísicos como Borges que entiendo que para algunos podría ser medio denso, pero que acá al menos creo que aportan agregando caos y desorden con los relatos de los personajes indígenas.
Ya me intrigaba hace tiempo la mística alrededor de Aira y su interminable cantidad de novelas, y la ridiculez de la escena con la que arranca La Liebre (Juan Manuel de Rosas haciendo abdominales en su oficina después de despertar de una pesadilla) me hizo inclinarme por ésta. La elegancia con la que escribe Aira ya alcanza, pero encima tiene mucho humor, personajes carismáticos, una imaginación increíble; y esos estiletazos medio metafísicos como Borges que entiendo que para algunos podría ser medio denso, pero que acá al menos creo que aportan agregando caos y desorden con los relatos de los personajes indígenas.
April 14, 2024
Als je begint aan een boek van César Aira, weet je nooit goed wat je te wachten staat. Pas als je het uit hebt, heb je door wat voor verhaal je nou eigenlijk hebt gelezen. Aira legt in zijn werken een bewonderenswaardige durf aan den dag, waarmee hij met verschillende genres en vertelstijlen experimenteert.
Zo bediende Aira zich in Het literatuurcongres al, nogal plotseling, van science-fiction-achtige elementen, en verraste het anders tamelijk nostalgische Hoe ik een non werd de lezer met een wel erg sinistere plotwending. Op vergelijkbare wijze laat ook De haas na te vervelen.
De haas vertelt het verhaal van een nogal onstuimige zoektocht naar de legibreriaanse haas op de Argentijnse pampa’s. En die zoektocht verloopt niet zonder moeilijkheden: oorlogen, intriges en mysteries blijven elkaar in een wervelwind van gebeurtenissen opvolgen en werken samen toe naar een overrompelende ontrafeling. Al met al is De haas een koortsachtige onderzoeking van de raadsels van de Argentijnse pampa’s, van de sublieme schoonheid en verwoestende kracht van hun meteorologie, en van het ruige leven van de inheemse Patagonische bevolking dat zich erop afspeelt.
Een leerling van Borges?
Zoals het werk van César Aira zich niet gemakkelijk laat onderbrengen in een enkel genre, zo is ook zijn schrijfstijl niet eenvoudig te kwalificeren. De moderne Argentijnse auteur schrijft nu eens poëtisch, dan weer ironisch en af en toe opvallend informeel. Hoewel die aanpak bij wijlen wat onelegant taalgebruik oplevert, maakt het de tekst bovenal bijzonder verrassend en onnavolgbaar.
Precies vanwege die volkomen herkenbare stijl manifesteert Aira zich als een op zichzelf staande auteur met een unieke stem in het Argentijnse literaire landschap. Het lijkt me dan ook dat de vergelijking van César Aira met Jorge Luis Borges, die wat mij betreft wat al te gemakkelijk wordt gemaakt, aan beide auteurs geen recht doet. Dat Aira’s recent in het Nederlands gepubliceerde werk De haas magisch-realistische elementen vertoont, maakt hem geen ‘leerling’ van Borges, zoals de Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung schrijft. Dat feit maakt alleen duidelijk dat Aira zich aansluit bij een inmiddels welbekende gewoonte van Latijns-Amerikaanse schrijvers, zoals Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez en Tomás Eloy Martínez, die magisch-realistische elementen inzetten om tot een uiteindelijk natuurgetrouwe weergave van de mysteries van het continent te komen.
Een geometrisch doolhof
De hoofdpersoon in De haas, Clarke, begeeft zich op de pampa’s in de hoop de zeldzame legibreriaanse haas in het echt aan te treffen. Toch laat hij zich zonder veel weerstand van zijn doel afleiden, om zich te mengen in de intriges van de indianen met wie hij meereist en om uiteindelijk een sleutelrol te spelen in de confrontaties die zich tussen de stammen ontspinnen. Gedurende dit alles probeert Clarke herhaaldelijk de wetten van de pampa te leren kennen. Op die manier raakt hij met regelmaat verstrikt in geometrische en metafysische overpeinzingen:
[…] bovendien leende de pampa met zijn gebrek aan topografie zich niet voor dat soort grappen. Het was puur terrein, geometrie […] Alles beperkte zich tot het trekken van lijnen, hoe sneller hoe beter: lijnen van aankomst en vertrek, die elkaar op magische wijze op élk punt kruisten, niet op een concreet punt. (p. 203)
De schijnbare eenvoud van de kale vlaktes is bedrieglijk; samen vormen zij een labyrint van lijnen, driehoeksmetingen en afstanden. Hoewel Aira zich loszingt van de bestaande Argentijnse literatuur en hij er zijn eigen fascinaties op nahoudt, moge het duidelijk zijn dat er in passages zoals die hierboven toch wat belangrijke inhoudelijke overeenkomsten met het werk van Borges te ontdekken zijn. Zo doen Clarke’s observaties over de pampa’s denken aan Borges’ verhaal De twee koningen en de twee labyrinten, waarin de ene koning de andere laat verdwalen in het labyrint van een woestijn. Ook een vergelijking met De dood en het kompas, waarin het labyrint bestaat uit één enkele, rechte lijn, ligt voor de hand.
De haas: feit of fictie?
Het verhaal is doorspekt met verwijzingen naar ‘de haas’, hoewel je als lezer geen grip krijgt op wat daar nou eigenlijk mee bedoeld wordt, omdat iedereen die het begrip in de mond neemt er iets anders mee lijkt aan te duiden. Gaat het om een daadwerkelijke haas, een diamant in de vorm van een haas, of is de haas een symbool voor iets veel abstracters?
Er ligt een waas van vaagheid over het Patagonische strijdtoneel in De haas. Door de taalproblemen en in elkaar overlopende mysteries voel je je als lezer bij vlagen net zo verdwaald in het verhaal als Clarke zich ontredderd voelt tussen de indianen. Maar Clarke is uiterst leerbaar: op den duur raakt hij eraan gewend dat sommige raadsels nou eenmaal onoplosbaar zijn, en probeert dan maar zijn schouders op te halen over zijn onontkoombaar verrassende wederwaardigheden op de pampa’s.
En precies op het moment dat je denkt dat hem dat is gelukt, worden in de tamelijk bombastische ontknoping, die van zoveel plotwendingen is voorzien dat het haast parodistisch lijkt, alle losse eindjes zo nauwkeurig aan elkaar geknoopt dat je je als lezer niet kan voorstellen dat Clarke nog met een onopgelost mysterie blijft zitten.
Je kan dan haast niet anders dan concluderen dat hij zijn legibreriaanse haas heeft gevonden. Al is die van een totaal andere aard dan al die tijd voor de hand lag.
Zo bediende Aira zich in Het literatuurcongres al, nogal plotseling, van science-fiction-achtige elementen, en verraste het anders tamelijk nostalgische Hoe ik een non werd de lezer met een wel erg sinistere plotwending. Op vergelijkbare wijze laat ook De haas na te vervelen.
De haas vertelt het verhaal van een nogal onstuimige zoektocht naar de legibreriaanse haas op de Argentijnse pampa’s. En die zoektocht verloopt niet zonder moeilijkheden: oorlogen, intriges en mysteries blijven elkaar in een wervelwind van gebeurtenissen opvolgen en werken samen toe naar een overrompelende ontrafeling. Al met al is De haas een koortsachtige onderzoeking van de raadsels van de Argentijnse pampa’s, van de sublieme schoonheid en verwoestende kracht van hun meteorologie, en van het ruige leven van de inheemse Patagonische bevolking dat zich erop afspeelt.
Een leerling van Borges?
Zoals het werk van César Aira zich niet gemakkelijk laat onderbrengen in een enkel genre, zo is ook zijn schrijfstijl niet eenvoudig te kwalificeren. De moderne Argentijnse auteur schrijft nu eens poëtisch, dan weer ironisch en af en toe opvallend informeel. Hoewel die aanpak bij wijlen wat onelegant taalgebruik oplevert, maakt het de tekst bovenal bijzonder verrassend en onnavolgbaar.
Precies vanwege die volkomen herkenbare stijl manifesteert Aira zich als een op zichzelf staande auteur met een unieke stem in het Argentijnse literaire landschap. Het lijkt me dan ook dat de vergelijking van César Aira met Jorge Luis Borges, die wat mij betreft wat al te gemakkelijk wordt gemaakt, aan beide auteurs geen recht doet. Dat Aira’s recent in het Nederlands gepubliceerde werk De haas magisch-realistische elementen vertoont, maakt hem geen ‘leerling’ van Borges, zoals de Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung schrijft. Dat feit maakt alleen duidelijk dat Aira zich aansluit bij een inmiddels welbekende gewoonte van Latijns-Amerikaanse schrijvers, zoals Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez en Tomás Eloy Martínez, die magisch-realistische elementen inzetten om tot een uiteindelijk natuurgetrouwe weergave van de mysteries van het continent te komen.
Een geometrisch doolhof
De hoofdpersoon in De haas, Clarke, begeeft zich op de pampa’s in de hoop de zeldzame legibreriaanse haas in het echt aan te treffen. Toch laat hij zich zonder veel weerstand van zijn doel afleiden, om zich te mengen in de intriges van de indianen met wie hij meereist en om uiteindelijk een sleutelrol te spelen in de confrontaties die zich tussen de stammen ontspinnen. Gedurende dit alles probeert Clarke herhaaldelijk de wetten van de pampa te leren kennen. Op die manier raakt hij met regelmaat verstrikt in geometrische en metafysische overpeinzingen:
[…] bovendien leende de pampa met zijn gebrek aan topografie zich niet voor dat soort grappen. Het was puur terrein, geometrie […] Alles beperkte zich tot het trekken van lijnen, hoe sneller hoe beter: lijnen van aankomst en vertrek, die elkaar op magische wijze op élk punt kruisten, niet op een concreet punt. (p. 203)
De schijnbare eenvoud van de kale vlaktes is bedrieglijk; samen vormen zij een labyrint van lijnen, driehoeksmetingen en afstanden. Hoewel Aira zich loszingt van de bestaande Argentijnse literatuur en hij er zijn eigen fascinaties op nahoudt, moge het duidelijk zijn dat er in passages zoals die hierboven toch wat belangrijke inhoudelijke overeenkomsten met het werk van Borges te ontdekken zijn. Zo doen Clarke’s observaties over de pampa’s denken aan Borges’ verhaal De twee koningen en de twee labyrinten, waarin de ene koning de andere laat verdwalen in het labyrint van een woestijn. Ook een vergelijking met De dood en het kompas, waarin het labyrint bestaat uit één enkele, rechte lijn, ligt voor de hand.
De haas: feit of fictie?
Het verhaal is doorspekt met verwijzingen naar ‘de haas’, hoewel je als lezer geen grip krijgt op wat daar nou eigenlijk mee bedoeld wordt, omdat iedereen die het begrip in de mond neemt er iets anders mee lijkt aan te duiden. Gaat het om een daadwerkelijke haas, een diamant in de vorm van een haas, of is de haas een symbool voor iets veel abstracters?
Er ligt een waas van vaagheid over het Patagonische strijdtoneel in De haas. Door de taalproblemen en in elkaar overlopende mysteries voel je je als lezer bij vlagen net zo verdwaald in het verhaal als Clarke zich ontredderd voelt tussen de indianen. Maar Clarke is uiterst leerbaar: op den duur raakt hij eraan gewend dat sommige raadsels nou eenmaal onoplosbaar zijn, en probeert dan maar zijn schouders op te halen over zijn onontkoombaar verrassende wederwaardigheden op de pampa’s.
En precies op het moment dat je denkt dat hem dat is gelukt, worden in de tamelijk bombastische ontknoping, die van zoveel plotwendingen is voorzien dat het haast parodistisch lijkt, alle losse eindjes zo nauwkeurig aan elkaar geknoopt dat je je als lezer niet kan voorstellen dat Clarke nog met een onopgelost mysterie blijft zitten.
Je kan dan haast niet anders dan concluderen dat hij zijn legibreriaanse haas heeft gevonden. Al is die van een totaal andere aard dan al die tijd voor de hand lag.
November 18, 2021
What a weird ride this was! A very entertaining and refreshing read. It's not often that I come across something as original as this book. I loved it from the beginning to the very end. Now, I want to consume everything Aira has ever written. Do I need to learn Spanish?
October 13, 2023
Empecé leyendo con la sensación de qué es esta boludez y, por varios capítulos, tuve la sensación que la realidad y la literatura se mezclaban hasta no distinguirse. La liebre de Aira era todo a mí alrededor. Hasta el último capítulo que es una boludez.
October 2, 2025
Very absurd and enjoyable. It's a surreal epic adventure tale that feels very self aware. There's a lot here that parodies colonialism, political leaders, philosophies and probably a lot more that washed over my head. The writing was great, and a lot of the imagery and set pieces have stuck in my mind. My favourite parts were the meandering philosophical ramblings when walking through the desert. The conclusion is very neat (maybe too neat) and it all just flows out.
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