Cumpleaños

by César Aira

Uno se da cuenta de que no tiene veinte años, de pronto, advierte que ya no es joven... y mientras tanto el mundo cambió; mientras uno estaba pensando en otra cosa. Cincuenta años. Un cumpleaños anticipado con expectación no por lo que deja atrás, sino por lo que se abre delante; que llega y pasa sin estridencias, y sólo unos meses después, tras un comentario aparentemente banal, que revela un conocimiento erróneo, lleva a César Aira a sentarse en un bar o en un café, como siempre hace, y escribir.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Short Stories, Biography Memoir, Essays, Novella, Latin American

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

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

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Hey, César! That's the way to celebrate your 50th birthday, with lots of balloons.

Unlike the other novels I read by César, one of my favorite Latin American authors, novels having characters moving through a series of happenings rendered via arc of plot, Birthday is more akin to a Spalding Gray monologue - rambling, quirky, where César offers personal reflections on his own writing and moving about within the cycle of life and death.

Other than the balloons, did César do anything special for his 50th, the marker for his treading the earth for half a century? Nope. César went on being the same old César. After all, as César reckons, authentic change comes from the most unexpected direction.

Then, several months later, feeling his usual buoyant and optimistic self, César tries cracking a joke while out walking with his wife Liliana. Hehehe. Liliana doesn't necessarily appreciate César's stabs at humor. The subject turns to the phases of the moon and it becomes evident César has always had it wrong, attributing new moon, crescent moon, half moon to the shadow of the Earth. Ahh! To be mistaken all these years.

And he's off. Shambling around with a wrong idea about the moon gets César thinking. César records ninety pages worth of thinking in Birthday, subjects and ideas that should appeal to both enthusiastic César Aira fans and those readers new to the author. Here are a batch of topics César turns his mind (and heart) to:

Talking to the Dead
César spends a week with his mother in Pringles, a small Argentine city that's a six hour bus drive due south from Buenos Aires. While writing in his notebook at a local cafe, the seventeen-year-old waitress approaches and tells César she always wanted to meet a real writer. Turns out, she writes, she couldn't live without writing since she can put down on paper what she could never say out loud.

She tells César she overcame her fear of death when her beloved brother died, the brother who became a father to her since her real father left their home forever when she was just a babe. Now her brother is still there for her, she can speak to him whenever she is in need of him. And for her, this supernatural connection is linked directly to her writing.

César recognizes her brother has taken on the role of Jesus, dead and risen, and she is his evangelist. For César, all this relates to his own experience of ideas that come to him when he first wakes from sleep – he attaches great importance to these waking ideas where you return to the world from the far side of a void, a blank, as absence, as if you are receiving a message from the land of the dead.

Magic Method to Snag Memories
“My style is irregular: scatterbrained, spasmodic, jokey.” This being the case, César, goes on to say: “The lack of a regular rhythm explains why I have to note down each idea as it occurs to me.” Oh, César, you would be all set if you could make your fantasy come true, to own a notepad (maybe an implanted microchip?) capable of capturing the hyperactivity of your brain. The best solution César came up with? Why, of course, as César states: “I became a writer and my little novels fulfill the roles of magic notepad and shorthand.”

Money to Pursue One's Art, Not Pursuing One's Art for Money
Like any true artist, César desired success ergo earnings from his writing so he could devote his time to writing. “I found life outside literature extremely difficult, so I left hardly anything outside. And yet, there's a sense in which everything is outside, from the moment I wake up till I go to bed, because I have to live like everyone else.” What César says here echoes other writer like Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley who admit they became writers since it was the only thing they were good at.

Scriptor Snips
I enjoyed the following re César's life and reading: “For some reason, I was always surrounded, in my youth, by pedants, know-it-alls and loudmouths, who were always ready to set me straight (this was my experience as well!).

" I read one book after another, two a day if they're not too long, and if they're really bad (though none of them are), I speed up in the final chapters, skipping pages: I never give up before the end – a superstition that I really ought to shed" (this is exactly my approach!).

"One personal “library” is never quite the same as another. I suppose it could be, by an unlikely coincidence, if it contained just a few, predictable titles; but with each new book that is read, the probably of a match diminishes exponentially" (I'm with César here – he and I have read so much, surely there never was nor will there be another human who has read exactly what we have read).

"Artists tend to be eccentric people, but I don't think it's because art has made them strange; rather their strangeness has led them to art" (as an oddball eccentric myself, I can relate to César's flaky eccentricity and I concur: one's strangeness, one's weirdness leads a person to the arts).

Sacrifice and Accomplishment
César relates his aim in writing was to write well and become a good writer, making the necessary sacrifices in order to achieve this goal, "obscurely aware that once it (becoming a good writer) is attained, everything else will be throw in for free." And how does our wise man of Argentina judge excuses? Expressed with Zen-like precision: "Excuses will always be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuse is valid."

Do you have a valid excuse for not reading Birthday? I certainly hope not! Assuming anyone reading this review is a good reader, your personal library will be enhanced by the inclusion of this little gem translated by Chris Andrews and available from And Other Stories.



Hang in there, César! We look forward to reading more of your books!

[Paula Mota · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Birthday” é um ensaio autobiográfico que César Aira escreveu a propósito do seu 50º aniversário. Tal como eu, Aira não é pessoa de balanços, mas ao contrário de mim, acreditou que este marco traria alguma mudança à sua vida, basicamente só porque sim.

I was thinking of the birthday exclusively as a point of departure, and although I hadn’t worked out anything in detail or made any concrete plans, I had very bright hopes, if not of starting over entirely, at least of using that milestone to shed some of my old defects, the worst of which is precisely procrastination, the way I keep breaking my promises to change.

O que os 50 anos lhe trouxeram ao invés foi, numa conversa banal sobre a lua, a revelação de que talvez os seus conhecimentos não fossem tão sólidos como julgava. A partir daqui, dispersa-se ao longo de 10 capítulos, falando do processo de escrita, das viagens à sua terra natal, da morte, do Juízo Final e do etnocentrismo, onde faz uma comparação, a meu ver, infeliz e politizada: que ser-se um escravo em África é o mesmo que trabalhar por um salário miserável na Argentina.
Talvez esta obra resulte melhor com quem já conhece a ficção de César Aira, o que não é o meu caso, falha que colmatarei muito em breve.

I’m the sort of person who doesn’t believe in anything. Which is nothing to be proud of, because not believing is a sign of immaturity or inexperience. If things had happened to me, I would have no choice but to believe in them. Except that I’m a maximalist and I say: Even if I saw it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope to review it properly soon, but for now just this (that resonates with me quite a bit at present):

"Suddenly it hits you: you aren’t twenty; you are not young anymore and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hat trick. My third Cesar Aira. Now to be fair, he does write short books and if you add up the three books, they fall short of a regular sized novel. But he packs so much into one that makes up for the lack of pages. I started reading my third volume of Proust, so an Aira books falls into a tiny category. Ha ha.

This book focuses on when Aira turned fifty. I believe today he is in his seventies. Unlike a young person, who hopefully has a lot to come in the future, a fifty-year old reflects on his past. He does so by chatting with a 17-year old future writer working in a cafe, where Aira was working on one of his short books. She claims that she has done a lot in her life (Aira didn’t interrupt her). He never saw her again. Did she accomplish her goal already.

He also reflects on Évariste Galois, who on the night before a duel, wrote down his theory on mathematics. He died in the duel but his theory on polynomials and group theory has stool since 1832. Impressive. Aira notes that even with his short novels, he doubts that he could pull it off in one night. Youth has something on him.

So he ponders life as he keeps writing novels. Why? Why not? Just do it. One day life will run out. We just don’t know when. BTW, brilliant cover.

Some good things to ponder:

“The sum is a flux...You can read thousands of books and go on being ignorant...” p. 33

“A catalogue of everything that we believe, left untranslated, would make us look stupid too.” p. 36

“He who waits deludes himself because what you’re waiting for has already begun and sometimes it’s already over. That’s the nature of the present.” p. 44

“As I saw it, the only practical benefit of my favourite pastime, reading: it showed me how to find the facts should I ever be required to put them to some use, an event that this preparation rendered all the more unlikely.” p. 55

“Excuses will be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuses is valid.” p. 57

“All right, then: I know nothing. Worse: I don’t know anything. AllI know is I don’t know it all.” p. 62

That is what literature is, as I understand it: extending and extrapolating meanings into the domain of real.” p. 66

[Pilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es ahora, a la tercera, después de El jardinero... y de Actos de presencia, que me doy cuenta de que este tipo es realmente un fuera de serie. Mantiene el vigor, la frescura y la perplejidad de alguien de veinte años. Considero su gran virtud que la falta de estilo sea su estilo y que me dé igual lo que tenga que contarme, que sea un gran ignorante y un gran bromista escribiendo de cosas tan serias, que sus novelitas carezcan de "rasgos circunstanciales" y que derroten a "la ley de los rendimientos decrecientes", como él mismo dice. Ahora que sé que todo forma parte de un grandioso proyecto estético y que afortunadamente me quedan unas treinta y tantas por leer.

[Helena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me sobreviene una pregunta. Puedo permitirme una excepción: si Aira habla de él, bien puedo escribir sobre mi hablando de Aira. Ya la frase parece complicada, no lo es, y la trama se complica sin necesidad de ningún tipo. Sucede que es muy tentador hablar de mi cunpleaños, con la vana esperanza de que Aira me lea hablando de mi cumpleaños con excusa de su cumpleaños y le pongamos así papitas a todo.


Este año cumplí años y es otro más cerca de los cuarenta. Falta, pero la cuestión es ascendente. Ahora si me cambia que una persona me diga que parezco más joven. Antes me daba igual. De atrás para adelante, en las últimas páginas de Cumpleaños, Aira habla de la juventud con candor y cariño, pero también con un dejo de nostalgia. Un mocoso de 21 años no puede saber nada de política, asegura en una página, luego en otro evoca la juventud como una versión de la belleza total que cada vez queda más atrás. Como un reflejo de uno mismo que se hace cada vez más difícil de evocar porque duele. Si este libro lo hubiese leído diez años atrás, este párrafo no me hubiese generado grandes controversias. Pero acá estamos y de paso me pregunto ¿Cómo pasó todo tan, tan, rápido?

RESEÑA COMPLETA EN:
http://revistacharleston.com/2017/08/...

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manifiesto de la estética de Aira. Con ocasión de cumplir 50 años en 1999 -es cuando se descubre ignorante de las fases de la luna-, Aira reflexiona sobre su literatura, aclara ideas, trata de explicitar supuestos, procedimientos, descubrimientos y algunas consecuencias. Cumpleaños es un borrador del sistema axiomático de Aira, un diagrama de la máquina que escribe sus libros. Es un dispositivo que necesita crearse a sí mismo. La máquina vive en otro mundo. Del otro lado de la madriguera del conejo. Ahí vive también Osvaldo Lamborghini, extático. Ahí ocurren cosas extrañas, por ejemplo, se escriben los libros de Aira. Ahí la máquina elabora prolegómenos de una enciclopedia totalmente anti-borgeana, que es la obra de Aira. Desde el otro lado se elaboran teorías sobre lo que ocurre de este lado, todas falsas por supuesto. Es que no hay isomorfismo, sólo coincidencias eventuales, como esas que tanto sorprendían a Bertrand Russell cuando viajaba en tren. Creo que se trata de una estética tremenda. Es posible que su primer axioma sea: nada abstracto hay en lo concreto. Del otro lado creo que no rige la negación, es una función inexistente, no definida. Es por eso que Aira satura lo concreto de abstracción. Entonces, el manifiesto no sirve de nada. Quizás por eso tenga tanto sentido.

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

No sé cómo hacer una review de un relato de Aira.
Son libros sobre nada, los emparento a capítulos de la mítica serie de TV Seinfield.

Con Aira no se sabe bien que pasa ni como sucede, pero misteriosamente uno tiene que seguir leyendo e imaginando y dando por buenos, eventos, personas y lugares que no se pueden tomar como partes de nuestro mundo. Está bueno leerlo.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

life is change and movement. i stay still, doing the same thing every day, while everyone else is rushing around at a phenomenal speed.

reading césar aira remains a singular joy, as with each new book (there are over 90!), his readers never quite know what to expect. the 16th of the argentine's works to be translated into english, birthday (cumpleaños) was published shortly after the author turned 50 (the english edition is released around the time of aira's 70th birthday). a ruminative, philosophical, and melancholy blend of personal reflection and self-criticism, birthday is one of aira's most endearing works (though likely to be enjoyed most by those already familiar with his prodigious, impressive output).

in a way, you don't have to be a believer to believe in the life to come, because the two lives are superimposed and blended in the present. "he who waits despairs," as the proverb says. i would say: "he who waits deludes himself" because what you're waiting for has already begun and sometimes it's already over. that's the nature of the present.

sticking to his "flight forward" style of composition, birthday ponders heady notions of life, death, aging, craft, meaning, purpose, knowledge, uniqueness, regret, stasis and change, and action ("the daughter of negativity"). it can be hard to delineate where fact and fiction converge in aira's writing, yet, as with nearly every one of his other books, birthday seamlessly blends the quotidian with the off-beat. armed amply with abundant humor, aira considers his own life and literary body with an equal dose of modesty and self-deprecation. birthday brims with thoughtfulness, contemplation, and resignation, revealing the personal side of one of latin america's most intriguing, prolific authors. a must-read for every aira fan.

there's a hole in me, and in that little white darkness, i discover the real heart of the mystery, which is also my rosetta stone. if i could translate what i don't know into what i know, i would be able to understand the purpose of my life. as things are, it all seems an illusion, a simulacrum made of words. and even if i understood, the scandal of my ignorance would remain intact. i lean over this bottomless well, narcissus reborn, and an unfamiliar sadness overcomes me. i think this is the first time i have felt like a part of humanity, just when i finally have a reason to feel different.

*translated from the spanish by chris andrews (bolaño, et al.)

[Michael Jantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my favorite Aira books, what feels to be happening is Cesar emptying all of his pockets and blindly launching into a narrative about the contents. He does it with a brilliant combination of almost hyperbolic self-deprecation and irreverent confidence. So little actually happens, and he is never loath in parading this fact about his “stories”. Birthday is among his best. It is a patchwork of brief stories and philosophizing, connected with hilariously reiterated exclamations , sometimes near-aphorisms.

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

210404: now here is something opposite the knausgaard i have just read. concise, comic, complete, contemplative. definitely not long enough to get bored, more essay than memoir, this seems poetically stripped down to only few scenes, few extras, one interesting meditation/biography on differences between mathematics genius and writing process. perfect for few hours reading on rainy Sunday afternoon...

[Danilo Flechaz Muñoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aira es un autor que parece oculto en las recomendaciones de boca en boca. Su nombre transita como un rumor de genialidad y extravagancia, como un ausente de un marco que pretenda encasillarlo. Tras su voluminosa obra literaria de novelas cortas, ensayos y traducciones, se ubica esta pequeña obra en la que expone sus pensamientos relacionados a la edad, el conocimiento y su estilo de vida, todo entorno a la labor del escritor.

Buscando una excusa para este texto, da inicio con una reflexión sobre su ignorancia respecto a la causa de las fases lunares a lo largo de un año. Aira compone una crítica a sí mismo, un escritor que ha ostentado el título de genial y experto, despojándose de cualquier mérito que provenga de sus recién cumplidos cincuenta años.

A mi edad, no puedo ver sino con espanto las eternidades de tiempo perdido en mi juventud. La falta de método, los desvíos caprichosos, las esperas de nada. Las horas desperdiciadas, los días, los años, las décadas.

Reflexiona alrededor de la espontaneidad de ser humano, de esa ausencia de linealidad que permite la creatividad y que forja con hierro cada historia como única e irrepetible. Una búsqueda de originalidad que quiso establecer con su marca personal a través de una obra extraña, difusa y laberíntica.

Ahora bien, las cosas no siempre salen como uno se lo propone; si no, todo sería obras maestras, o los artistas serían siempre jóvenes. Para demostrarlo, bastaría comparar las dos imágenes de mi cifra personal: el que me gustaría ser, y el que soy.

Siguiendo este hilo concluye que la genialidad solo puede residir en la juventud y como premio del caótico destino. Se cuestiona su vivir, la cantidad de caminos que pudo haber recorrido y cómo pensar es una actividad que solo se logra al ver las aparentes incoherencias de nuestro lenguaje.

Si tuviera que hacer un resumen final, diría que el problema fue éste: toda mi vida busqué el conocimiento, pero lo busqué fuera del tiempo, y el tiempo se tomó venganza sucediendo en otra parte. Es por eso que la experiencia no me enseñó nada (el asunto de la Luna), y el conocimiento quedó en un plano alucinatorio. Y ahora descubro que ese plano también me expulsa; se pliega, desaparece… En una buena novela la ilusión se logra mediante la acumulación de rasgos circunstanciales, y para hacer ese trabajo hay que creer. El día antes hay que creer, el día después hay que haber creído.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first César Aira and won’t be my last. This is a really short book about a man who spends his 50th birthday reflecting on philosophy, science, literature and everything in-between. I adored the wandering stream of consciousness and how he mused on so many different things with such beautiful writing. A complete gem of a book and can’t wait to read more from the author.

[Ceci Damiani · Rating 2 out of 5]

""Cumpleaños"" es un ensayo breve en el que el autor hace un balance de su vida cuando cumple 50 años. Un balance que muchos hacen, e inevitablemente miran un poco más hacia atrás que hacia adelante. En él Aira hace referencias a sus placeres, lo que hizo y no hizo con su vida, lo que disfrutó y lo que no, y principalmente una reflexión acerca de la pérdida del tiempo. Ese bien que ni con todo el oro del mundo puede recuperarse. Hace interesantes reflexiones acerca la lectura y la escritura, ambas aficiones que lo acompañaron toda su vida, nos habla de su rol como escritor, desarrollando una escritura desaforada y la cual lo acompaño siempre y sin la cual no puede imaginarse.

Una primera parte muy original e interesante, donde aplica charlas cotidianas y ejemplos muy extravagantes, de la mitad en adelante me sentí perdida.Tenía mucha curiosidad con este autor y temo no haber dado con un buen comienzo. Veré un próximo Aira para quitarme la duda"

[Samantha Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short work by prolific author Aira, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews, is almost exactly what I was expecting--a brief interlude written by a man musing on his perception of reality while an important birthday passes.

He begins with an embarrassing anecdote about how he never really learned the science behind the phases of the moon. Recently he made a joke about the earth creating a shadow across the moon. His wife corrected him. It was then he realized that his entire life he’d been wrong about something he just assumed he knew, a fact of reality he had never questioned before and one which was never contradicted throughout his youth. He tries to backtrack, to discover when he first assumed a shadow created the moon’s phases. It brings him back to his youth in Colonel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province, where he sits in a cafe and writes this volume.

I enjoyed the meandering prose, but only because Aira’s writing is so sincere. As slim as the volume is, there’s weight to his words. There’s a passage that will stay with me: “I subscribe to the unoriginal theory that what makes a person unique and different from everyone else is a sum of particular experiences accumulated over the course of an existence...Reading a book, of course, is an experience too, and the sum of books that a person has read makes him or her unique as a reader.”

So the books we read comprise our unique fingerprint, and we only have so many minutes, hours, days to read what we can in one lifetime. The reminder of that had me spiraling a bit. I’m 30--so for the last 20 or so years, what I’ve read on the shelves of the personal library of my mind has made me who I am. And what I choose to read from this point forward with the measly time I have left will compose the rest of me. The pressure is real.

Pick up this book if you’re interested in having a conversation with a very interesting human about what it means to be of a certain age during this certain time in history. Reflection on mortality can come with a smile.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a gift from my nephew. He has marvelous taste. A quick read and full of funny and discomfiting insights about writing and letting go.

[Gala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creo que una de las cosas que más me gustó de esta novelita es que no pensé que tenía todo el contenido ensayístico. Es super autobiográfica y me gusta porque Aira cumple cincuenta y se regala un libro (vuelvo a robar una cita de @derian no te puedo etiquetar). En Evasión Aira dice que la literatura es ocupación del tiempo, y acá está haciendo eso, ocupando el tiempo cuando vuelve a Pringles y va a un bar a hablar con una mesera (dice mesera, sí), o cuando después vuelve al bar y la mesera ya no está más, está otra que no habla de libros como la primera, no quiere escribir como la primera. Ocupa el tiempo escribiendo. Me gusta mucho el principio, cuando habla de las fases de la luna con la pareja, y después me gusta también que Aira es súper sentencioso, todo lo que dice acá, que igual lo entiendo porque está en un formato más cerca del ensayo, lo dice como afirmación irrefutable. Eso genera como un efecto porque es como que le creés todo, y algunas cosas son muy así, como cuando habla de que los cambios más genuinos, los que afrontamos de manera más genuina, son esos que se producen en lo que menos esperábamos.

[Adrià Ibáñez Pelegrí · Rating 5 out of 5]

"¿Cómo será, tener veinte años? Con un esfuerzo puedo imaginarme el vigor, la frescura, la belleza, la sonrisa de esa edad. Pero lo veo como algo lejano, una construcción mental, casi desprovista de realidad. Algo que pasó hace doscientos años, en otro mundo, y al mismo tiempo curiosamente cercano, íntimo. Una fantasía personal. Trato de darle realidad interpolando con los jóvenes que veo en la calle, pero no es lo mismo. [...] Un joven todavía tiene que empezar a vivir. Puede haber tenido todas las ideas, pero le falta revisarlas, corregirlas, invertirlas Es para eso que necesita todos los años y las décadas que siguen. Las ideas sólo pueden servirle como una mnemotécnica. Tenerlo todo en la mente es una señal de juventud. A mí me ha tentado la idea de vivir de una vez, directamente. Pero es imposible, porque habría que haberse muerto"

Este librito me agarró en el metro de camino a casa y ya no me soltó hasta que hube recorrido la línea 1 dos veces, y habiendo llegado a la última frase. Intuí que a partir de entonces César Aira ya no me abandonaría jamás.

[Daniel Calle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una vez estaba en Buenos Aires comiendo en un restaurante, venía de comprar unos libros que dejé en la mesa, cuando llegó el mesero. Una de nuestra mesa preguntó “qué nos recomienda?” Y el mesero tomó mis libros y nos dijo: “les recomiendo que lean a Kohan y a Cesar Aira”.
Y pues acá estoy cumpliendo la promesa. Debo decir que aunque se nota que es un tipo muy punzante y divertido sentí que el libro tenía poco hilo conductor y caía en un monólogo sobre la vida. Bien escrito eso si. 3.5
Pd, hacerle zoom a la historia de Evariste Galois 👌🏻

[Sohum · Rating 5 out of 5]

endings are everything; the final essay in this collection/memoir/formally-inventive work could end your life if you allowed it. reading aira means running around in a spiral--to hew ever closer to the workings of a brilliant mind, and yet to never arrive. there is no higher pleasure.

[Leopoldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

No sé cómo empezar a escribir esta reseña. Ni siquiera sé cómo condensar todo lo que este libro me dijo. Después de quedar confundido y atónito con la lectura de Cómo me hice monja, no sabía qué pensar del escritor argentino. Un par de meses después leí este extraño libro, a raíz de asistir una charla que daría Aira en mi ciudad. Ha sido una de las más gratas sorpresas que me he llevado este año.

Todo comienza con el narrador, que acaba de cumplir cincuenta años. Digo narrador, porque me siento inseguro de hablar de Aira como si de verdad fuera él, como si se valiera siempre de una sinceridad tramposa. En todas sus novelas "César Aira", una especie de ente sin forma, aparece como una niña (o niño) que se convierte en monja (o no), en un científico loco, en un explorador... En esta especie de ensayo narrativo, el César Aira que nos habla directamente es lo más parecido posible al de carne y hueso, al que yo tuve la oportunidad de ver hace un par de días.

En su ya característico estilo (risomático e inconexo), César nos habla sobre la vejez, la juventud, sobre la gente extraña, la lectura y los libros, sobre el oficio de vivir y el de escribir (que muchas veces terminan siendo el mismo), todo en una prosa magnífica y transparente.

Esa misma transparencia es la que me conmovió y me perturbó. Después de probar cientos de máscaras, el autor hizo un maravilloso descubrimiento: la careta que mejor lo oculta es la suya propia.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not quite sure whether to classify Birthday as a work of fiction or a kind of intellectual biography of its author, César Aira. In fact, Aira makes a solid case for this being a short intellectual biography of the Argentinian author. Yet, the man is devious enough to embellish the facts to make a good story, which this is.

What distinguishes Aira's fictions from all others is the forward motion of the story even if he leaves characters and events in the lurch. In his Dinner, the dead come to life in the middle of the story and become zombies. When the residents of Colonel Pringles, Argentina figure out to send them back to the cemetery, the story goes on as if the whole zombie episode had never happened.

The fact of the matter is that I am addicted to Aira's work and have read everything I could find that has been translated into English. Good stuff!

[Deni · Rating 4 out of 5]

dice que Osvaldo Lamborghini es un genio

[Benjamin Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birthday by Cesar Aira came out twenty years ago and was recently translated (brilliantly) by Chris Andrews. For Birthday, Aira, for his 50th year of life, wrote about writing, living, dying, and knowing. I loved so many passages of this book. I feel like Aira steps his feet into my soul and reads aloud what I needed to hear, maybe the words on these pages are something else entirely and I have hallucinated the entire story. Knowing that all he knows is not all; this to me encapsulates it perfectly. I feel the ignorance of life deep in my cellular structure - which I could scarcely identify under a microscope - which by luck alone I could bring to a focus - and never tell you about how it's glassware truly works; I feel this ignorant fool again when I remember I have only just found out a month ago that Cesar Aria exists on the planet, yet he speaks to me as if I've known him for all his fifty years; though I have only lived a mere thirty, and then I realize again, this book is twenty years old; How is this? How can mathematics and science rebound my previous faith in logic? I don't know. All I know is I definitely, assuredly don't know all.

[Evan Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first time reading Aira, and likely a poor place to start. This memoir is funny, thoughtful and at times hits at something like clarity. Mostly though, it is a breezy walk through the author’s philosophy of knowledge and meaning— which seems like a solid to him, but a vapor to me.

As I am not familiar with Aira’s style, I can’t say whether this particular work is under-baked (giving us the murky philosophical postulates), or if it is over-baked (condensed, sapped of flavor which seems so near at hand).

3/5 worth the page count.

[Eric NYOB · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book? I think not really. An interesting book? Definitely. This might be Aira in a nutshell. The book starts pointlessly and oddly; it continues into boring places and deep places; it terminates at a random point. In the interim, many interesting and funny observations, some drivel, some drudgery. I read what there was of Aira in English and wanted more and decided to make myself able to read Spanish. After this book --- a random starting point --- yes, it was worth it.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quotes

"The lives of strangers have their own rules, which differ from case to case, and anyone who tries to deduce them from a chance meeting is bound to get lost in an ocean of conjectures." (36)

"...it would be like demolishing a bridge I hadn't yet crossed." ( 79)

"If I had to sum it up, I would formulate the problem like this: all my life I pursued knowledge, but I pursued it outside time, and time took its revenge by unfolding elsewhere." (80)

[Leonardo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Es malito, no tiene una trama clara y la apuesta narrativa se rompe como en la página 12 cuando te das cuenta que esto no es un libro sino el diario de alguien que no tenía qué publicar... y que alguien publicó sin un mínimo de rigor crítico o respeto por la literatura de verdad. No le pongo una estrella porque el autor ha demostrado en otras obras que es un gran escritor.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es como sentarse a escuchar a Aira decir sus boludeces geniales. Muy interesante. Si fuese de un Nadie, no lo publicarían. Vale la pena porque algunas ideas que condensa son perlas. De paso, se lee en dos horitas y te deja pensando y queriendo subrayar por todas partes.

[Adriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una de Aira sin trama ni personajes, 100 páginas de la más pura nada.