César Aira | The Seamstress and the Wind / 2011

the elements of fiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira The Seamstress and the Wind, translated by Rosalie Knect (New York: New Directions, 2011)

 

 This is the sixth English-language translation of Argentinean writer César Aira’s over eighty publications of fiction. For devotees of his writing—and I now consider myself one of them—each new book is a must, different as they are from one another. For each of these slightly quirky fictions takes the reader into new territory where we feel that the author, like the great storytellers of all time, is making it up as he goes along. These short volumes, accordingly, seem so fresh that we might imagine that if Aira were to begin the story over by repeating the first few pages, the ending would be entirely different.

     The Seamstress and the Wind begins, in fact, with the author revealing some of his methods. “Trapped” for a few weeks in France (the narrator proclaims he dislikes traveling), the author decides to write a fiction with two major elements: his central character must be a seamstress and the tale must include the wind. The narrator claims that he seeks through these two elements to write “a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions.” And he proceeds to do so, beginning with an autobiographical memory from his childhood in the Argentine suburb of Coronel Pringles, where one day he and a school friend decide to play a game of hide and seek within an open semi-truck parked near their houses.

     As the friend draws near him, pretending to be a monster of sorts, the young narrator closes his eyes in horror. When he opens them his friend has disappeared, and a few moments later he finds himself, almost as if he has fallen into a time warp, at his own kitchen table, startling his mother, who has been told he is missing and, unable to find him, is quietly pondering her and the family’s predicament. It is his friend, in reality, who has gone missing, and after a search of the entire neighborhood, the mother, Delia, who works as a seamstress, becomes convinced, having begun to lose her sense of reality, that her son has been “stolen” by the neighborhood truck driver, Chiquito, now on his way to make a delivery of good in Argentina’s vast and empty Patagonia.

     Scooping up the wedding dress upon which she is working, she hires one of the town’s two taxi drivers to chase after the truck, and speeds away into the night..

     Thus Aira whips up a kind of strange Keystone-cop-like chase that results in a series of, just what he has determined his fiction should be: a story of odd adventures and inventions that remove this fiction from any sense of being a “novel,” and transforms the work into a kind absurdist fantasy. As the taxi and its occupants speed off into the desert, they suddenly crash, with enormous velocity, into the back of the huge truck, instantaneously killing the taxi driver and sending poor Delia into a kind of coma, as their small taxi, impaled into the back of the truck, moves off into space, without the truck driver having the least suspicion of the accident. He is in a hurry to reach his destination.

     Meanwhile, Delia’s husband, returning home from work, is told by the neighborly gossips that his wife has gone off, and he, in his own kind of madness, takes after her in the family car, followed by a small blue car of Delia’s customer, determined to retrieve her wedding dress.

     Part of the joy of reading Aira is the surprising series of strange events as they occur, so I will not reveal all of the long series of amazing adventures that these figures endure. Let us just say that the remaining events of the fiction include Delia’s husband’s addiction to gambling, a strange gambling den in the middle of nowhere, a transformation of the woman who is to be married the next day, Delia’s romance with the strong Patagonian wind, a mysterious “monster child” created out of a sort of atomic meltdown of the gambling den, and a rediscovery of a large Paleolithic armadillo shell. Few American writers, except perhaps for Mac Wellman, could possibly whip up a story with these unlikely props. Aira makes it all seem easy, and, although it is thoroughly unbelievable—particularly for those stepped in realist traditions—the author somehow poetically combines them to create a sense credible denouement. If the “scattered elements” of Aira’s fable do not magically come together “at the end in one supreme moment,” like a magnet they click into place as the wind shuffles and deals each of these characters his or her fate.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2011     

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2011)

César Aira | Varamo / 2012

center's collapse

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira Varamo, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama) 2002 / New York: New Directions, 2012)

 

 The fifth translated book I've now read of Aira's is one of the most hilarious. An insignificant Panamanian government employee, Varamo, is paid his monthly salary, one day in 1923, in counterfeit money, money he recognizes as being false the moment it is placed into his hands. This law-abiding and fearful citizen of Colón, accordingly, is faced with an intense crisis for the first time in his life.

      If he attempts to cash the money he is certain that he will be arrested for counterfeiting and, since Panama has had very few cases of such a crime, will be made an example of, the authorities creating new methods of punishment as an example to the populace. Yet how can he survive without money for another month? Although he lives modestly as a bachelor, he cares for a slightly mad mother, and has his own expenses. Moreover, just having the money on his being might endanger him. Were he to give it away, he is certain that he will be tracked down. Perhaps the counterfeit money itself is a kind test. In short, Varamo is put into a kind moral and even metaphysical predicament which requires all of his abilities to resolve.

      Aira takes us through this first day and night of this man's horrifying situation, wherein he is threatened by forces larger than him, and which all seem to implicate him in some grand plot of which he has no knowledge. On his way home from the Ministry, he is accosted by a local madman who insists Varamo owes him money and is approached by a shady underground figure, Cigarro, to award him the small winnings of his mother's gambling bet.

      At home, even his personal objects, his selves of food, his bed, his mirror seem to accost him. His Chinese mother arrives in a state of near hysteria, having received, so she claims, a blackmail letter. Work on his hobby of embalming goes no better, and before he can stop her his mother has cooked up the fish he painted with chemicals, feeding it up for dinner.

      In a near fever of dread, Varamo attempts to walk, as he does daily, to the local bar, only to be confronted what he describes as "the voices" speaking meaningless sentences to him as they daily do, words that he cannot put together to create significance.

      Just as he is about to step into the street, he witnesses a car hit another automobile containing the country's Treasurer who, in his new, just announced role as Minister of the Interior, is determined to observe the country's "regularity rallies," "races" through the roads and highways where the goal is to keep to a slow, regularly-timed pace. The Treasurer/Minister is unconscious, and Varamo is forced by his driver (Cigarro in another role) to take him to a local house owned by two spinster sisters.

     There, in the "lion's den," he discovers the sisters know perfectly well who he is, that they have been working with the underground to sell golf-clubs, carrying them as canes, one-by-one from local ships with whom they communicate in code through messages bounced off of the regular passer-by Varamo, which explains the mysterious voices he encounters night after night.

     After another entanglement with Cigarro's girlfriend, the sisters' maid, Varamo is entrusted with the code book, charged with scrambling up the codes before it falls into Cigarro's or other's hands.

     When the dizzyingly confused Varamo finally escapes the sisters' house, he finds publishers at the bar, men who abuse Panama's lack of participation in the International Copyright Agreements, who are interested in having him write a book about his embalming experiences, promising him an advance precisely of the amount of his counterfeited salary. Having never written a word before in his life, Varamo is skeptical, obviously, about such an undertaking, but has little choice: it is a perfect solution to his dilemma.

     So, after a mind-releasing walk through the late-night Colón, does Varamo return home to write:

 

“He sat down, and wrote the poem. It is true that the verb "to write" covers a wide range of practices. In this case the author simply copied out all the papers he had put in his pocket since leaving the Ministry that afternoon. He did this in a cumulative fashion, without punctuation or divisions, without rearrangement, in lines of irregular length (the idea of prose, a late refinement in old civilizations, was utterly foreign to him). The order was determined by chance. The code book provided a basic structure, and he alternated the keys with literal transcriptions of the other notes. He had the advantage of having received contradictory instructions, which he followed with

providential diligence of a beginner: Caricias had told him to change the keys to make them unrecognizable, and the publishers had advised him to leave the raw materials as they were.”

 

     The final work, The Song of the Virgin Child, Aira tells us at the beginning of the book, became the "celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry," a work "drilled into the minds

of schoolchildren or regularly chosen for recitation in poetry competitions."

      On top of Aira's hilarious spoof of how great experimental work is created, the author also plays with notions of genre, arguing that his own narrative, since it is "true," is not a fiction but a use of the third person to tell the "truth," as a journalist might. It is after all, he insists, a story well known and evident in the structure of Varamo's work itself, like all highly modernist experiments, is a work that reveals its own reality.

     Of course, Aira's work is not at all truthful, but an absurd series of "postmodern" lies pretending to represent reality. And the joy of Varamo lies in the fact that as the fictional poet's world collapses about him, forcing him to build up a new conception his world, the reader gets to tag along, to play with the character and author in the creation of a new universe made up of the accidental and coincidental elements of an imagined life. And isn't that what the creative act is really all about?

 

Los Angeles, Easter Day, 2012

Reprinted from Rain Taxi

 

Anne Gédéon Lafitte, Marqis de Pelleport | The Bohemians

writer’s nose

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anne Gédéon Lafitte, Marqis de Pelleport The Bohemians, trans. from the French by Vivian Folkenflik, with an Introduction by Robert Darnton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

 

In the late 1780s the marquis de Sade sat, before his transfer to the insane asylum at Charenton, imprisoned in the Bastille, writing his memorable “erotic” fiction, Les 120 Journées de Sodome. What we are told in this newly rediscovered fiction, Les Bohémiens, is at the very same moment, another marquis, the Marquis de Pelleport, was sitting in a nearby cell penning his own erotic and sometimes slanderous work, as strongly dedicated to open and libertine sexuality and anti-church sentiment as de Sade’s notorious fiction.

     Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in English for the first time since its original 1790 publication, The Bohemians was nearly lost to history. As Robert Darnton, in a substantial introduction writes, “Only a half-dozen copies are available in libraries throughout the world” of the work which “opens a window into the world of garret poets, literary adventurers, down-and-out philosophers, and Grub Street hacks” that might never again have been available.

     Pelleport was himself, as the final chapters titled “The Pilgrim’s Narrative” reveals, just such a figure. Like many others of the day, he wrote what might now be compared to the popular tabloid newspapers, gossip of famous people that was so scandalous that, on occasion, the wealthy paid to squelch its publication. Moreover, Pelleport got involved with numerous other scams, including the attempt to transport of wine for which he had not paid, and other petty criminal acts.

    In the fiction’s numerous digressions—Darnton suggests among the author’s influences are Don Quioxte and Tristam Shandy—many of these autobiographical elements are hidden, but are unimportant in the flow of the narrative. The author himself mocks his own digressions, often taking the part of the reader to argue for and against the loose narrative structure he has chosen. It is apparent, however, that that structure—despite the editor’s or publisher’s assertion that the work is a “Novel” on the front cover—are perfectly at home in the picaresque genre which the work follows, a structure in which the characters are constantly on the move, awaiting each day for a new adventure. 

     A great deal of the fun of this writing issues from the authorial voice questioning, justifying, and simply playing with the reader’s expectations. For the reader unfriendly with pre- and post-modern literary techniques, this book will surely appear as a self-conscious parody of fictional tropes. Chapter Seven, for example, joyfully begins:

 

                 Have you ever been to Saint-Malo? I know nothing of the place, to tell

                 the truth, and for once my ignorance proves my good faith; for you are not

                 someone I would fib to, like travelers who lie with more imprudence if they

                 their listeners have never been within a hundred leagues of the place in

                 question. Ah well! Take me as I am: a man who has crossed the equator

                 twice.

 

     Similarly, Chapter Thirteen takes on the possible impatience of the readers for all the narrative intrusions:

 

                  You grow impatient, dear reader, you seem annoyed to see the heavy

                  curtain of rational discourse lowered onto the stage. If I took your word

                  for it, my actors would have no interval to catch their breathes. I am

                  thrilled to hear the stamping of your feet and your neighbors’ canes

                  in interruption the orchestra, while provincials in the audience call: “Begin!

                  Begin!”

 

The “put-down” of the reader continues for a few more paragraphs.

      Moreover, The Bohemians, like many works of its day, contains no coherent narrative. A band of would-be philosophers wander about the countryside, all arguing their ridiculous philosophical positions with one another when they are not busy stealing livestock and vegetables from nearby peasants or giving themselves up to the sexual pleasures of the women who accompany them.

     If the work of gay-artist David Wojnarowicz so severely shocks the sensibilities of some American viewers that the Smithsonian Museum can be made to remove his work, A Fire in My Belly, then the Marquis de Pelleport will thoroughly offend conservative readers in his hilariously over-the-top depiction of an orgy held by the Bohemian troupe accompanied by a group of Capuchin monks and even a donkey. Despite the narrator’s outrageously overblown metaphors of chivalric love with which he describes all the possible combinations of sexual acts, de Pelleport allows us to almost smell the sweat of lust and dust which permeate his tribe of absurd thinkers, leading a convent head later in the book to insist he can literally smell the Capuchin upon them.

     As I have mentioned, the last chapters concern Pelleport’s life itself, a sad tale of woe he blames on his career as a writer. His adventures, however, also focus upon a rope bequeathed to him by monk which, with a quick pull, suddenly enlarges his nose, thereby attracting all women to him immediately—presumably since the protuberance hints at the size of his sexual organ. He is, at first, quite delighted, until this writer’s nose leads him further and further into danger before he becomes so utterly impoverished and entrapped that he ends up—well, we already know where—in a cell neighboring the great sexual sado-masochist.

      In all, de Pelleport’s tale is a true treat for the ears. The only problem is that, at times, it is so literate, so embedded with literary metaphors, classical stories, and references to obscure texts that the editor and translator found the need to include some 44 pages of small-print footnotes, explaining their meaning to the modern reader. These are highly useful; but the flip back and forth between text and its academic trappings leads to a somewhat arduous and laborious trip through de Pelleport’s sassy satire. 

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XVI, No. (Spring 2011).

            

Moacyr Scliar | The War in Bom Fim

ANOTHER WAR

by Douglas Messerli

 

Moacyr Scliar The War in Bom Fim, translated from the Portuguese by David William Foster (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University, 2010)

 

Often described as the major Jewish author of Brazil, Moacyr Scliar, who grew up in the South of the country in Porto Alegre, died this year on February 27, soon after Texas Tech University had published his earliest fiction, The War in Bom Fin in English.

     Originally published in 1972, this fiction appears, at first, to be a kind of magical realist tale of the mostly Jewish immigrant community of Bom Fim during World War II in the 1940s. And in that context the work, at times, might remind one of a kind of mix between Sholom Aleichem and Neil Simon, as the story weaves in and out of descriptions of the poor Jewish citizens and their lives, involving two young boys, their father Samuel, his loveable and somewhat resistant mare, Malke Tube, their fearless mother Shendl, and magical events that define this Yiddish-speaking society, including the omnipresence of Chagall and his “floating violinists,” whom the narrator transports to the streets of Porto Alegre along with the possibility of Kafka living nearby. On the other side of this somewhat nostalgic vision exists the games of the young brothers, Joel and Nathan, as they and their neighborhood friends imaginatively fight a war against the Nazis, who unknown to the adults, have invaded a nearby beach. With Joel as their leader, Nathan as a flying savior, and every child and beast at their side, the city of Porto Alegre is amazingly saved again and again, even when, at the end of the war, Hitler attempts to hide out in a nearby mansion.

     This part of the story, which takes up a larger portion of the book, presents a sort of wonderfully and innocently benign picture of the dying Jewish community; but as the boys begin to grow up, and the older parents begin to leave the neighborhood, things gradually turn grimmer, finally collapsing into a series of absolute horrors that demonstrate that despite their primarily symbolic battles with hatred, this community is affected as well by anti-Semitism and the abandonment of social and religious values.

     From the earliest pages of the book, moreover, there are clues that not everything in Bom Fim is right. The local dog, Melâmpio, hates Jews, and barks on winter nights to point the way to their house for Stukas and Messerschmitts. The author’s insistence of mentioning—every time he describes the large tree-lined Redenção Park in the middle of town—the benches of waiting pederasts seems almost homophobic; and, ultimately, one of the children, Alberto, is described as letting "himself be buggered." Rosa, a young girl, is raped in the park and leaves home. With the end of the war, new shops and high-rise apartments come to Bom Fim, making it more and more difficult for Samuel to sell his meager wares from his cart.

     But these are only the rumblings of far more terrifying events that bring down the curtain on Scliar’s seemingly rhapsodic recollections. The younger, frailer brother, Nathan, suddenly dies. Joel’s mother goes insane and is locked away in an institution. His father, Samuel, is grotesquely trapped under his beloved mare, and must disembowel the beast to escape. Joel, himself, leaves Bom Fim as he becomes increasingly assimilated into a non-Jewish world, and ends up selling jewelry. One by one the poor homes of Bom Fim are torn down to be replaced by newer and larger structures.

     Near to where old Samuel now lives is a German bartender, who, trying to keep a low profile, endures the occasional tirades of Samuel and other Jewish customers. For his birthday, however, his two reprehensible sons, capture Samuel, hoping to show him off their father, as they threaten to burn him as in the Nazi death camps. The terrified old man attempts to run off, but falls, hitting his head, and dies. To hide the crime, the sons cut up the body into pieces at the very moment that their mulatto mother returns home from a night of sexual pleasures, and, witnessing the pieces of meat before them, is insistent that they continue with what she perceives to be a barbecue. Inviting several other friends, she, her friends, and the speechless, now sickened brothers, sit down to a cannibal feast. 

     In another part of the city, Joel attempts to entice a wealthy young girl to have sex. Ultimately, realizing that any relationship with her will be impossible, he steals a car and, in with a strong sense of nostalgia and self-pity, determines to visit his father to talk in Yiddish with him about the old times. So ends Scliar’s memorial to his Jewish past, none of which now appears to be salvageable or to represent any possible salvation.

     Joel’s ending realization that “the war is over,” may also signify his inability to perceive that another war—a war to win back his heritage and meaning—has just begun.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2011

Reprinted from Rain Taxi