Patrick Flanery

Life in reverse

Given his Proustian preoccupations, it is no surprise that he focusses on the scented lime blossoms, gathered each year to make a calming tea

issue 17 February 2018

The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the Argentinian writer’s massive literary output — now more than 70 books — remains inaccessible in English. In this novella, which teases readers with suggestions of the autobiographical, Aira has one eye on his country’s past and the social effects of Juan Perón’s regime, and the other on the literary legacies of Proust. For Aira’s unnamed narrator, it is not the taste of lime blossom tea that spurs his fluid reminiscences, but a particular tree itself, ‘grown to an enormous size’ and central to the small-town landscape of his childhood in Coronel Pringles, where Aira himself was born. Here the narrator’s father, a hot-headed electrician, collects the tree’s blossoms each year to make
a calming tea.

The narrator is unsettled, however, by the suspicion that his memories, which leap back and forth between the Perónist years and their aftermath, may be nothing more than fabrications.

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