Varamo

May 7, 2012
Aira, author of more than 80 published books, returns with another slim story, this one about an ineffectual government clerk who, after wandering around 1923 Colón, Panama all night, sits down and in one fell swoop writes the most famous poem in the modern Central American canon. But Aira is less concerned with the result than he is with the events immediately leading up to its composition: an attempt to embalm a fish; a conversation with two reclusive sisters who live in the neighborhood; a "regularity rally," or race in which the winner is the driver who deviates least from a predetermined speed between start and finish. The book is structured around a series of chance encounters, while also giving Aira some asides on broader concepts like the nature of perception, the promises of narrative form, and human thought. We never get to read Varamo's great poem, and the story might strike some as dilatory and unfocused, but others will relish Aira's language ("The stars were an overwhelming surprise") and the simplicity of his set pieces, one of which serves as the book's last image and involves birds gently pecking at a small red candy stuck on the branches of a bush.

March 15, 2012

Varamo, a fiftyish Panamanian bachelor civil servant, has just been paid 200 pesos in counterfeit currency and doesn't know what to do about it. So he wanders through the city of Colon, encountering numerous eccentrics, until he runs into three publishers in a cafe who urge him to write a book on his hobby, taxidermy. With no previous writing experience, he pens a poem, "The Song of the Virgin Boy," which ends up becoming one of the most celebrated masterpieces of Central American poetry. Instead of dealing with embalming, however, the poem is a re-creation of the events that happened earlier that day, pieced together from notes, an ironic apology of the writing craft. VERDICT This delectable novella by prolific Argentine author Aira constantly pulls the reader's leg, heightening the absurdity in a playful, desultory style reminiscent of magic realism. At about the novel's midpoint, the author directly intervenes by discussing his theory of narratology, the fruit of which he claims is in the reader's hand. For those who like writing in the vein of Garcia Marquez and other masters of 20th-century Latin American literature.--Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.