The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El presidente [The President]
The eponymous president (never named) is president of Argentina. He seems to live an entirely solitary life in the Casa Rosada – unmarried with seemingly no contact with staff/colleagues. He goes out at night wandering the streets and is not recognised though lots of people hear him singing, a tune he learned from his childhood friend, who may or may not be dead. Two women have influenced him though both were kidnapped and he refused to pay the ransom, though both seem to have survived. The book gets weirder as we progress, ending with a project he has to rescue one of the women and the perhaps not dead childhood friend and have the other woman examined by medical experts to see if her determined single-mindedness can be useful to the country. As always with Aira it is never quite clear what is going on but is what makes him such an interesting writer.