The Musical Brain

Starred review from January 5, 2015
Aira’s output has been a steady trickle of irrefutable genius and deepening strangeness, from the haunted architecture of Ghosts to delirious westerns set in the pampas of South America, such as The Hare. Now we have the first collection of Aira’s stories, which might be his masterpiece. Essentially 20 novelettes, this book includes the tales “A Thousand Drops,” in which the paint droplets constituting the Mona Lisa evacuate to start lives of their own, and the title story, in which Aira’s hometown of Coronel Pringles, Argentina, becomes a phantasmagoria of flying dwarves. Aficionados will recognize the author’s imitable modes: the philosophic wormhole (as the logic of numbers leads to the brink of absurdity in “The Infinite”), the comedy of coincidence (as in “The All that Plows Through the Nothing,” which begins with an overheard conversation at a gym and ends with the death of a man who claims to have “become literature” after seeing the back of a ghost), and the gnomic furniture dramas (such as “Acts of Charity,” which consists entirely of the description of a house that a priest is constructing for his successor). But there’s something new, too: pieces that comment implicitly on Aira’s process, which, like the great avant-garde pianist channeled in “Cecil Taylor,” refuses to leave “the particular for later” and which inscrutably mingles form and narrative.

January 1, 2015
Twenty hallucinatory, open-ended short stories by Aira (Shantytown, 2013, etc.), an Argentinian master of improvisational writing.Reading Aira's work can give you the feeling of being swept up in a flash flood and carried along whether you're ready or not. It's certainly constant momentum that marks this collection of work, written over the past decade or so-stories begin in the middle, spin on a dime and are often as warped as a Salvador Dali landscape. The opener, "A Brick Wall," joins stories like "The Infinite," "The Two Men" and the title tale in remembering (or dis-remembering) a childhood in Argentina but also paying testament to the enduring strangeness of a child's imagination and sometimes mocking the author's own literary reputation. "Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples. I wouldn't want anything I've written to be taken as an example," Aira writes in "The Infinite." On the flip side, "The All That Plows through the Nothing" finds the first-person narrator working out in a gym, eavesdropping on local housewives and ultimately offering a tender but also funny meditation on aging and death. "Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature," he writes. Then there are the stories that are, as they say, completely different. For instance, "God's Tea Party," in which the creator regularly celebrates his birthday with a lavish affair to which only apes are invited as "a kind of deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed at a human race that has disappointed Him." Or "A Thousand Drops," in which drops of oil paint from the Mona Lisa run off to start creative lives of their own. Or "Poverty," a love letter that anthropomorphizes the condition of being poor into a constant companion. Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but very few can write their way out of a corner better than Aira.

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March 1, 2015
This collection of 20 stunning, funny, newly translated short stories written between 1993 and 2011 embodies the best of Argentine writer Aira's quirky, philosophically reflective prose. In Picasso, a genie forces the narrator to choose whether he would prefer to possess a priceless, original painting by the Spanish artist, or to become the great master himself. The Dog takes place entirely inside a crosstown bus in Buenos Aires, as a persistent stray canine chases the narrator for several blocks, prompting a series of deeply existential inquiries. A Thousand Drops begins with a mysterious disappearance of the Mona Lisa: the canvas and frame remain, while the oil paint itself has simply vanished. The narrator of No Witnesses experiences a terrible, bizarre encounter with his Dostoyevskian double. The stories grow increasingly complex in Aira's deft handling of Borgesian plot twists and come alive with the cosmopolitan tenor of Manuel Puig. This endlessly entertaining and deliciously strange collection serves as the perfect complement to Aira's recent novels, Shantytown (2013) and The Conversations (2014).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)