César Aira


César Aira is an Argentinian writer and translator, and an exponent of contemporary Argentinian literature. Aira has published over a hundred short books of stories, novels and essays. In fact, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is a truly frenetic level of writing and publication—two to five novella-length books each year. He has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires, on Copi and Arthur Rimbaud, and at the University of Rosario on Constructivism and Stéphane Mallarmé, and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela.

His work

Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas, arguing for the central importance, when approaching some minor eccentric writers, of examining the moment of their lives about which they are writing, the date of completion of the work, and the date of publication of the work. Aira also was the literary executor of the complete works of his friend the poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini.

Style

Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a "flight forward" to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others, the "continuum" of a constant momentum in the fictional narrative. As a result, his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and "subliterary" genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas. He frequently refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended.
While his subject matter ranges from Surrealist or Dadaist quasi-nonsense to fantastic tales set in his Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, Aira also returns frequently to Argentina’s nineteenth century. He also returns regularly to play with stereotypes of an exotic East, such as in Una novela china, ; El volante, and El pequeño monje budista. Aira also enjoys mocking himself and his childhood home town, Coronel Pringles, in fictions such as Cómo me hice monja, Cómo me reí, El cerebro musical and Las curas milagrosas del doctor Aira. His novella La prueba served as the basis—or point of departure, as only the first half-hour follows the novella—of Diego Lerman's film Tan de repente . His novel Cómo me hice monja was selected as one of the ten best publications in Spain in the year 1998.

Awards and honours

Pamphlets and standalone short stories