César Aira

Continuación de ideas diversas es una sucesión de piezas breves sobre los temas más variados —la literatura, por supuesto, pero también las artes plásticas, el insomnio, la perplejidad ante el paso del tiempo, etcétera− unidas por el tantas veces olvidado tono de la reflexión. Es inútil, pues, intentar describir este libro desde el "trata de": la apuesta de Aira es mucho más radical. Quiere devolver el lenguaje al centro de la tarea del...

"Daily conversations in outdoor cafés with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men's uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot--involving a mutant...

"In César 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...

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to...

"A young woman in Buenos Aires spies three women in the house opposite her family's home. Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences. Lange's imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth-century...