César Aira Overview

César Aira has two tremendous strikes against him for the élitist American literary cognoscenti: he is extraordinarily prolific, and his writing has been endorsed by Roberto Bolaño.  Quite unfortunately for this unique writer's reputation, it seems that Bolaño's formidable shadow may long lurk over Aira's work, and in turn be judged beside it.  His texts – only several of which have been translated into English – are entirely different from Bolaño's, however, sharing with the more famous writer only an infectious exigency to his prose and a distinct, haunting presence that permeates all of the wildly different plots and interests that his work pursues.  Aira manages at once to be playful and menacing, and in this way much of his work recalls a fairy tale in tenor; his formal daring seems so off-the-cuff that one almost hesitates in discussing it, as if to do so would be missing the point, focusing in one direction even as the text itself points in another.  He is quite formally experimental, but only insofar as it conceptualizes the content of his work; it would be difficult to trace a distinct "experimental" trope that runs through all of his novels, novellas, short stories, and essays: each work seems organically grown from its own discrete roots, with Aira acting only as a means to make these stories manifest in language.