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Showing 1 - 16 of
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The Divorce (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Chris Andrews; Introduction by Patti Smith
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R275
R223
Discovery Miles 2 230
Save R52 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation
Prize Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its
translation A recently divorced man trying to enjoy himself in one
of the trendier districts of Buenos Aires finds himself at the
centre a series of strange coincidences. These blips in causality
are at first easily rationalised, but soon escalate from the merely
implausible to the impossible to the cataclysmic. More, each
accident of fate, piling one atop the other, drags a new, rambling
tale in its wake, until the very ground beneath the man's feet
seems likely to buckle beneath the weight of so many shaggy dogs.
And yet, with master storyteller Cesar Aira holding their leashes,
what better vacation from reality could any reader-or
divorce-desire?
A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'")
strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park: "My
Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was
part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is
suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least
of our hero's problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the
insufferable boor Ovando-"a complete loser" but a "man supremely
full of himself: Conceit was never less justified." And yet, is
Ovando a master magician? Can he turn sugar cubes into pure gold?
And can our protagonist decline the offer Ovando proposes granting
him absolute power if the writer never in his life reads another
book? And is his publisher also a great magician? And the writer's
wife? Only Cesar Aira could have cooked up this witch's potion (and
only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome
crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)-a brew bubbling over with
the question: where does literature end and magic begin?
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Birthday (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Chris Andrews
1
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R245
R198
Discovery Miles 1 980
Save R47 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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`Suddenly it hits you: you're not twenty; you're not young any more
. . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something
else, the world has changed.'Birthday begins with a fiftieth
birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months
later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the
author's knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a cafe
and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories
together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his
incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author's and
the reader's point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a
moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas
(1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was
advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to
record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico.
Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the
nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America.
However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction
weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind
Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve
in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific
vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the
mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true
inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the
chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out
onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would
come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price
that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create
a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid
absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and
irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
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The Hare (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Nick Caistor
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R385
R337
Discovery Miles 3 370
Save R48 (12%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Clarke, a nineteenth-century English naturalist, roams the pampas
in search of that most elusive and rare animal: the Legibrerian
hare, whose defining quality seems to be its ability to fly. The
local Indians, pointing skyward, report recent sightings of the
hare but then ask Clarke to help them search for their missing
chief as well. On further investigation Clarke finds more than
meets the eye:in the Mapuche and Voroga languages every word has at
least two meanings.Witty, very ironic, and with all the usual
Airian digressive magic, The Hare offers subtle reflections on
love, Victorian-era colonialism, and the many ambiguities of
language.
Cesar Aira's newest novel in English is not about a conventional
doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His
personality - his weaknesses,whims, and pet peeves - is summed up
in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very
special gift for miracles. He no longer cares about
miracles,however, and has no faith in them. Perhaps he is even a
little ashamed about his supernatural powers. Such is Dr. Aira, who
also has to confront his arch-enemy- chief of the Pinero Hospital,
Dr. Actyn - who is constantly trying to prove that Dr. Aira is a
charlatan. Poor Dr. Aira is indeed a worker of miracles, but Cesar
Aira - the magesterial author - sends the very human doctor
stumbling toward the biggest trap of all, in this magical book.
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Ghosts (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Chris Andrews
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R382
R311
Discovery Miles 3 110
Save R71 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors
looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that
crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply
television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a
sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch,
three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up
to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course." - from Ghosts
Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a
building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their
quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her
questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story
reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that
her daughter's life hangs in the balance.
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Fulgentius (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Chris Andrews
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R419
R335
Discovery Miles 3 350
Save R84 (20%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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By profession I am a soldier, a general in the glorious Roman army.
As a playwright, I think of myself as a sublime amateur. In Cesar
Aira's new novel, Fulgentius, a sixty-seven-year-old imperial Roman
general-"Rome's most illustrious and experienced"-is sent to pacify
the remote province of Pannonia.He is a thoughtful, introspective
person, a saturnine intellectual who greatly enjoys being on the
march away from his loving family, and the sometimes deadly
intrigues of Rome. Fulgentius is also a playwright (though of
exactly one play) and in every city he pacifies, he stages a grand
production of his farcical tragedy (written at the tender age of
twelve) about a man who becomes a famous general only to be
murdered "at the hands of shadowy foreigners." Curiously, what he
had imagined as a child turns out to be the story of his life,
almost. As the playwright-turned-general broods obsessively about
his only work, the magnificent Lupine Legion-"a city in movement"
of 6,000 men, an invincible corps of seasoned fighters wearing
their signature wolfskin caps-kills, burns, pillages, and loots
their way to victory. But what does victory mean?
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Birthday (Paperback)
Cesar Aira; Translated by Chris Andrews
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R379
Discovery Miles 3 790
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Before you know it you are no longer young, and by the way, while
you were thinking about other things, the world was changing-and
then, just as suddenly you realize that you are fifty years old.
Aira had anticipated his fiftieth-a time when he would not so much
recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead-but the
birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later,
while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the
phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows
about his life. In Birthday Aira searches for the events that were
significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes
,and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal
truths, and meditates on literature meant as much for the writer as
for the reader, on ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally,
Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way,
which makes it even more irresistible.
The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with
nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how
truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to
anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America
demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility,
and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas
Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a
conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to
make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even
the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely
anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the
European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex
portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies,
even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to
embrace."-Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a
nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The
beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down
to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything
is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken,
including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the
veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel.
Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood
experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing
up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The
novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As
self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of
anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into
something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure,
fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and
fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main
treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A
few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of
the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained
the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had
known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This
epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and
melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the
meaning of life and the importance of literature.
Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of
his hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator - who could well be
the author himself, although nothing is guaranteed in a book by
Cesar Aira - suddenly recalls the Sunday mornings of his childhood,
when his father would take him to gather the lime-flower blossoms
from which he made tea. Beginning with his father, handsome and
`black' and working-class, and his strikingly grotesque mother, the
narrator quickly leaps from anecdote to anecdote, bringing to life
his father's dream of upward mobility, the dashing of their
family's hopes when the Peronist party fell from power, the single
room they all shared, and his mother's litany of political rants,
which were used - like the lime-flower tea - to keep his father
calm. Aira's charming fictional memoir is a colourful mosaic of a
small-town neighbourhood, a playful portrait of the artist as a
child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's own
extraordinary imagination.
Three novels by Cesar Aira combines three short novels by the cult
Argentinian writer in one beautifully designed box set. Irreverent,
playful, provocative and prolific, Argentinian author Cesar Aira
has written over seventy books and has been acknowledged
internationally to be one of the most original and provocative
authors in world literature. Collected here are three of his
novellas, to be published for the very first time in the UK. In
Ghosts, an immigrant worker's family are squatting on the haunted
construction site of a luxury condominium building. All of the
workmen and their families see the ghosts which float around the
place, but one teenage girl's interest in them becomes so intense
that her mother realizes her life is in the balance. An Episode in
the Life of a Landscape Painter tells of a point in the life of
German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, when he visits Latin America
to paint its spectacular landscapes. There, a strange episode
interrupts his trip and irreversibly marks him for life. And in The
Literary Conference, a young translator called Cesar Aira travels
to a literary conference, intent on world domination . . . Praise
for Cesar Aira: 'Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want
to stop' Roberto Bolano 'Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge
Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald' Los Angeles Times
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