Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize
Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation
It is certain that The Divorce will leave you breathless. Patti Smith
A divorce leads a man to Buenos Aires. In a trendy cafe he witnesses a minor accident involving Enrique, the owner of his guest house; this accident reunites Enrique with a childhood friend, with whom he had miraculously escaped from a raging fire in a miniature replica of a boarding school. So starts a true master-yarn from Booker finalist Aira.
Arvustused
'The Divorce outlines the process for those wishing to comprehend or to experience the expansive possibilities of a single moment. That is his wondrous gift, and The Divorce is the personification of that gift . . . It is certain that The Divorce will leave you breathless.' Patti Smith ----'Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop.' Roberto Bolano ----'By the time this miraculously dense book has reached its conclusion, Aira has wheeled through the gothic novel, noir, sci-fi, family saga, social satire. It is almost impossible to believe the text occupies only 115 pages . . . Reading The Divorce is like witnessing an explosion, or the birth of an alphabet.' David Kurnick, Public Books ----'His unpredictability is masterful.' Rivka Galchen ----'Sui generis is really the only way to accurately describe Cesar Aira. He's by turns a realist, a magical realist and a surrealist - and therefore not really any of them. Anything can happen in an Aira novel, and almost everything does.' Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times
César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own so far. He declared that he might have become a painter if it werent so difficult (the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all). He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels. By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but.
His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luís Borges literature of ideas. He has been called many things: slippery (The Nation), too smart (New York Sun), infuriating (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of perplexing episodes (New York Review of Books). Hes also been called one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today (Roberto Bolaño) and the most original, shocking, exciting and subversive Spanish-language author of our day (Ignacio Echevarría). Patti Smith was quickly seduced when she read The Seamstress and the Wind, and admits that seeing him at a writers conference: I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard.
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