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The Seamstress And The Wind (2011)

by César Aira(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0811219127 (ISBN13: 9780811219129)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

New Directions

review 1: I think C�sar Aira is one of the best living writers. There are about six books out in English now: "How I Became A Nun" (with one of the best opening scenes in all contemporary literature); "Ghosts" (a wonderful story about naked middle-aged male ghosts who hang around a building site, annoying people); "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter" (based on a real episode, in which an explorer was hit by lightning and dragged from his horse); "The Literary Conference," "The Hare," and I think one more...[return][return]At his best Aira is spectacular: tremendously inventive, unpredictable, reflexive. This book is an older one, written in 1991, and it's the only one of his I haven't enjoyed. It's much more along the lines of Latin American magic realism of the 1970s a... morend 1980s, with the addition of a postmodern authorial voice. At the beginning, Aira says he doesn't want to follow the dictates of memory, and there's a wonderful quotation along those lines that he attributes to Boulez:[return][return]"Memory makes things felt, heard, and seen rise into the light, a bit the way a bolus of grass rises again in a ruminant. It may be chewed, but it is neither digested nor transformed." (p. 9)[return][return]The problem is that the opposite of this dependence on memory is, in this book, a continuous whimsical magic-realist inventiveness. There are many reasons to dislike magic realism, and they have been well rehearsed. In the context the two most pertinent are (1) that magic realism is the symptom of a need to continuously produce wonder, and that itself reveals a more interesting problem: that the author feels reality needs a kind of frantic augmentation; and (2) that magic realism has, by principle, no rules, and that freedom also removes a constraint on the reader's attention. If anything can happen, the rules of the writing are relaxed to the point where it is no longer possible for the author to make a misstep. Where anything is permissible, there is also no failure, and no tension in watching the author negotiate his invented world.[return][return]The other five or six books of Aira's (more comments are on the LibraryThing site) are tremendous. I'll certainly be watching to see what is translated next: but I probably won't read anything written before the late 90's.
review 2: Another farce of the same order as How I Became a Nun and The Literary Conference, and anyone who has read those novellas knows what to expect here. There are some nice isolated moments and lines, but the book--like those other two--feels improvised because it is: Aira eschews revision as part of his pseudo-aleatory technique. The book is good fun, but lacks the moments of genuine humour in his other light novels (sure, it's "funny" on an intellectual level, but I never actually laughed). Even though I will inevitably keep reading all of his books, I do find the absurdist books frustrating on another level: as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape painter shows, Aira is capable of writing great, serious literature when he wants. So, The Seamstress and the Wind is, ultimately, an OK book by an author capable of much better, and is certainly the least essential of his novels published by New Directions so far. less

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