Free as Aira
CÉSAR AIRA, a sixty-eight-year-old Argentine writer based in Buenos Aires, has not heretofore been a household name in North America. Yet Aira’s prose pours forth unstoppably—he’s approaching a hundred titles over the last three decades—and now English translations are beginning to catch up to his Spanish output, with new American and British editions coming out several times a year, thanks largely to New Directions.
His latest books to appear here come emblazoned with a dizzying collection of blurbs by writers and publications famous in the Hispanic and Anglophone worlds. Yet few of these eager blurbers seem to agree on just which other artists and writers Aira best resembles. Praise comes from a host of major publications and more obscure literary magazines, and from authors including Patti Smith, for the , and whose “Hail César!” now festoons at least two English-language paperback reprints. Other blurb writers, struggling to connect Aira to more familiar reference points, adduce Bolaño (who himself wrote an admiring preface for Aira’s , in which he says Aira “defies classification”), Aesop, Breton, Borges, Sebald, de Chirico, Nabokov, Calvino, Kafka, Cervantes, Dada, B-movies, and the Energizer Bunny. Apparently Aira is a Dadaist, a Surrealist, a Cubist, and is and is not a Magical Realist. Which in the end probably means that the writer Aira most closely resembles is himself.
