The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La villa (Shantytown). This is another highly original work from Aira, with a very complicated plot involving a boy from a wealthy family, who is not very bright but is very strong, helping scavengers from a nearby shantytown collect rubbish, with a view to selling anything … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Las conversaciones (Conversations). This is another brilliant long story/short novel from Aira, about his favourite subject of the boundaries between fiction and reality. It starts with two friends talking about a trashy Hollywood film they saw the previous night on TV, with the narrator mocking the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ricardo Piglia‘s Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration). This novel, published during Argentina’s Dirty War, goes around that issue, focussing on history and literature and, using, to some degree the detective novel form. The first part involves an exchange of letters between writer Emilio Renzi and his uncle Marcelo Maggi. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Yo era una mujer casada [I Was a Married Woman], one of his stories that has not (yet) been published in English. This one tells of a woman, Gladys, in a terrible marriage. Her husband abuses her, drinks, does drugs and takes all her money (she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Martín Caparrós‘ La Historia [History]. This massive novel – over a thousand pages long – was first published in 1999 but only in a very limited print run, so it has been very difficult to obtain. Anagrama have now published it in a larger print run. It is … Read more
I have just returned from the one continent that has no native born writers (though it does have a few native born people). It also has one bookshop, as the Port Lockroy bookshop in the British Post Office sells a few books. I am, of course referring to Antarctica. However, en route we stopped in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La confesión [The Confession]. This is another strange story from Aira, with most of the action taking place in a chair at a family reunion, where Count Orlov is seated. The Orlovs are descended from a distinguished Russian family that emigrated to Argentina. They are now … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference). This is another totally original story from Aira, using Hollywood B movie tropes (mad scientist, unworldly creatures, advanced technology). The hero/narrator César, a literary translator who has not had much work recently because of the financial crisis, manages to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Las aventuras de Barbaverde [The Adventures of Barbaverde]. Yes, I am afraid yet another novel in Spanish that has not been translated into English (and many more to come, I regret.) This is now the eighth of his works that I have read, four of which … Read more
The most recent additions to my website are two César Aira novels. I continue to be amazed by everything I read of his. Varamo (Varamo), which has been translated into English, is a novel about a low level Panamanian civil servant who goes home one evening and, though he has never written, indeed, never even … Read more