The Argentinian writer César Aira is a prodigy: at the age of 68 he has published, according to a ‘partial bibliography’ on Wikipedia, 67 novels (plus non-fiction, plays and translations into Spanish from four languages). It’s a record made only slightly more believable by the fact that the novels are mostly around 100 pages long. ‘Automatic writing’ is often mentioned in the books themselves (Aira supposedly doesn’t revise much, or at all). In 1992, for example, he published five novels — a personal best which he nonchalantly repeated in 2011.
Certainly, he glides through — or over —his stories, with the light irony and digressive versatility of Ovid, poet of the Metamorphoses. The effortlessness seems supernatural (even the name Aira recalls the breeze, as in ‘Buenos Aires’). And in this there is an irresistible harmony with his prevailing themes, which might be described as post-magical-realist: sci-fi-influenced notions of the uncanny, and the interpenetration of real life and creative mental processes.
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