Birthday By César Aira
life is change and movement. i stay still, doing the same thing every day, while everyone else is rushing around at a phenomenal speed.reading césar aira remains a singular joy, as with each new book (there are over 90!), his readers never quite know what to expect. the 16th of the argentine's works to be translated into english, birthday (cumpleaños) was published shortly after the author turned 50 (the english edition is released around the time of aira's 70th birthday). a ruminative, philosophical, and melancholy blend of personal reflection and self-criticism, birthday is one of aira's most endearing works (though likely to be enjoyed most by those already familiar with his prodigious, impressive output).
in a way, you don't have to be a believer to believe in the life to come, because the two lives are superimposed and blended in the present. he who waits despairs, as the proverb says. i would say: he who waits deludes himself because what you're waiting for has already begun and sometimes it's already over. that's the nature of the present.sticking to his flight forward style of composition, birthday ponders heady notions of life, death, aging, craft, meaning, purpose, knowledge, uniqueness, regret, stasis and change, and action (the daughter of negativity). it can be hard to delineate where fact and fiction converge in aira's writing, yet, as with nearly every one of his other books, birthday seamlessly blends the quotidian with the off-beat. armed amply with abundant humor, aira considers his own life and literary body with an equal dose of modesty and self-deprecation. birthday brims with thoughtfulness, contemplation, and resignation, revealing the personal side of one of latin america's most intriguing, prolific authors. a must-read for every aira fan.
there's a hole in me, and in that little white darkness, i discover the real heart of the mystery, which is also my rosetta stone. if i could translate what i don't know into what i know, i would be able to understand the purpose of my life. as things are, it all seems an illusion, a simulacrum made of words. and even if i understood, the scandal of my ignorance would remain intact. i lean over this bottomless well, narcissus reborn, and an unfamiliar sadness overcomes me. i think this is the first time i have felt like a part of humanity, just when i finally have a reason to feel different.
*translated from the spanish by chris andrews (bolaño, et al.) 9780811219099 Manifiesto de la estética de Aira. Con ocasión de cumplir 50 años en 1999 -es cuando se descubre ignorante de las fases de la luna-, Aira reflexiona sobre su literatura, aclara ideas, trata de explicitar supuestos, procedimientos, descubrimientos y algunas consecuencias. Cumpleaños es un borrador del sistema axiomático de Aira, un diagrama de la máquina que escribe sus libros. Es un dispositivo que necesita crearse a sí mismo. La máquina vive en otro mundo. Del otro lado de la madriguera del conejo. Ahí vive también Osvaldo Lamborghini, extático. Ahí ocurren cosas extrañas, por ejemplo, se escriben los libros de Aira. Ahí la máquina elabora prolegómenos de una enciclopedia totalmente anti-borgeana, que es la obra de Aira. Desde el otro lado se elaboran teorías sobre lo que ocurre de este lado, todas falsas por supuesto. Es que no hay isomorfismo, sólo coincidencias eventuales, como esas que tanto sorprendían a Bertrand Russell cuando viajaba en tren. Creo que se trata de una estética tremenda. Es posible que su primer axioma sea: nada abstracto hay en lo concreto. Del otro lado creo que no rige la negación, es una función inexistente, no definida. Es por eso que Aira satura lo concreto de abstracción. Entonces, el manifiesto no sirve de nada. Quizás por eso tenga tanto sentido. 9780811219099 No sé cómo hacer una review de un relato de Aira.
Son libros sobre nada, los emparento a capítulos de la mítica serie de TV Seinfield.
Con Aira no se sabe bien que pasa ni como sucede, pero misteriosamente uno tiene que seguir leyendo e imaginando y dando por buenos, eventos, personas y lugares que no se pueden tomar como partes de nuestro mundo. Está bueno leerlo.
9780811219099 Aira es un autor que parece oculto en las recomendaciones de boca en boca. Su nombre transita como un rumor de genialidad y extravagancia, como un ausente de un marco que pretenda encasillarlo. Tras su voluminosa obra literaria de novelas cortas, ensayos y traducciones, se ubica esta pequeña obra en la que expone sus pensamientos relacionados a la edad, el conocimiento y su estilo de vida, todo entorno a la labor del escritor.
Buscando una excusa para este texto, da inicio con una reflexión sobre su ignorancia respecto a la causa de las fases lunares a lo largo de un año. Aira compone una crítica a sí mismo, un escritor que ha ostentado el título de genial y experto, despojándose de cualquier mérito que provenga de sus recién cumplidos cincuenta años.
A mi edad, no puedo ver sino con espanto las eternidades de tiempo perdido en mi juventud. La falta de método, los desvíos caprichosos, las esperas de nada. Las horas desperdiciadas, los días, los años, las décadas.
Reflexiona alrededor de la espontaneidad de ser humano, de esa ausencia de linealidad que permite la creatividad y que forja con hierro cada historia como única e irrepetible. Una búsqueda de originalidad que quiso establecer con su marca personal a través de una obra extraña, difusa y laberíntica.
Ahora bien, las cosas no siempre salen como uno se lo propone; si no, todo sería obras maestras, o los artistas serían siempre jóvenes. Para demostrarlo, bastaría comparar las dos imágenes de mi cifra personal: el que me gustaría ser, y el que soy.
Siguiendo este hilo concluye que la genialidad solo puede residir en la juventud y como premio del caótico destino. Se cuestiona su vivir, la cantidad de caminos que pudo haber recorrido y cómo pensar es una actividad que solo se logra al ver las aparentes incoherencias de nuestro lenguaje.
Si tuviera que hacer un resumen final, diría que el problema fue éste: toda mi vida busqué el conocimiento, pero lo busqué fuera del tiempo, y el tiempo se tomó venganza sucediendo en otra parte. Es por eso que la experiencia no me enseñó nada (el asunto de la Luna), y el conocimiento quedó en un plano alucinatorio. Y ahora descubro que ese plano también me expulsa; se pliega, desaparece… En una buena novela la ilusión se logra mediante la acumulación de rasgos circunstanciales, y para hacer ese trabajo hay que creer. El día antes hay que creer, el día después hay que haber creído.9780811219099 In my favorite Aira books, what feels to be happening is Cesar emptying all of his pockets and blindly launching into a narrative about the contents. He does it with a brilliant combination of almost hyperbolic self-deprecation and irreverent confidence. So little actually happens, and he is never loath in parading this fact about his “stories”. Birthday is among his best. It is a patchwork of brief stories and philosophizing, connected with hilariously reiterated exclamations , sometimes near-aphorisms. 9780811219099
Soon enough you realize that you are no longer twenty years old, because right away you are no longer young ... and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was also changing. And then, just as suddenly, you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—and yet that birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. This book consists of a series of short chapters in which Aira searches for and meditates on the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes, and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and wonders about literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, about ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible. Birthday
I hope to review it properly soon, but for now just this (that resonates with me quite a bit at present):
Suddenly it hits you: you aren’t twenty; you are not young anymore and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed. 9780811219099
Hey, César! That's the way to celebrate your 50th birthday, with lots of balloons.
Unlike the other novels I read by César, one of my favorite Latin American authors, novels having characters moving through a series of happenings rendered via arc of plot, Birthday is more akin to a Spalding Gray monologue - rambling, quirky, where César offers personal reflections on his own writing and moving about within the cycle of life and death.
Other than the balloons, did César do anything special for his 50th, the marker for his treading the earth for half a century? Nope. César went on being the same old César. After all, as César reckons, authentic change comes from the most unexpected direction.
Then, several months later, feeling his usual buoyant and optimistic self, César tries cracking a joke while out walking with his wife Liliana. Hehehe. Liliana doesn't necessarily appreciate César's stabs at humor. The subject turns to the phases of the moon and it becomes evident César has always had it wrong, attributing new moon, crescent moon, half moon to the shadow of the Earth. Ahh! To be mistaken all these years.
And he's off. Shambling around with a wrong idea about the moon gets César thinking. César records ninety pages worth of thinking in Birthday, subjects and ideas that should appeal to both enthusiastic César Aira fans and those readers new to the author. Here are a batch of topics César turns his mind (and heart) to:
Talking to the Dead
César spends a week with his mother in Pringles, a small Argentine city that's a six hour bus drive due south from Buenos Aires. While writing in his notebook at a local cafe, the seventeen-year-old waitress approaches and tells César she always wanted to meet a real writer. Turns out, she writes, she couldn't live without writing since she can put down on paper what she could never say out loud.
She tells César she overcame her fear of death when her beloved brother died, the brother who became a father to her since her real father left their home forever when she was just a babe. Now her brother is still there for her, she can speak to him whenever she is in need of him. And for her, this supernatural connection is linked directly to her writing.
César recognizes her brother has taken on the role of Jesus, dead and risen, and she is his evangelist. For César, all this relates to his own experience of ideas that come to him when he first wakes from sleep – he attaches great importance to these waking ideas where you return to the world from the far side of a void, a blank, as absence, as if you are receiving a message from the land of the dead.
Magic Method to Snag Memories
“My style is irregular: scatterbrained, spasmodic, jokey.” This being the case, César, goes on to say: “The lack of a regular rhythm explains why I have to note down each idea as it occurs to me.” Oh, César, you would be all set if you could make your fantasy come true, to own a notepad (maybe an implanted microchip?) capable of capturing the hyperactivity of your brain. The best solution César came up with? Why, of course, as César states: “I became a writer and my little novels fulfill the roles of magic notepad and shorthand.”
Money to Pursue One's Art, Not Pursuing One's Art for Money
Like any true artist, César desired success ergo earnings from his writing so he could devote his time to writing. “I found life outside literature extremely difficult, so I left hardly anything outside. And yet, there's a sense in which everything is outside, from the moment I wake up till I go to bed, because I have to live like everyone else.” What César says here echoes other writer like Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley who admit they became writers since it was the only thing they were good at.
Scriptor Snips
I enjoyed the following re César's life and reading: “For some reason, I was always surrounded, in my youth, by pedants, know-it-alls and loudmouths, who were always ready to set me straight (this was my experience as well!).
I read one book after another, two a day if they're not too long, and if they're really bad (though none of them are), I speed up in the final chapters, skipping pages: I never give up before the end – a superstition that I really ought to shed (this is exactly my approach!).
One personal “library” is never quite the same as another. I suppose it could be, by an unlikely coincidence, if it contained just a few, predictable titles; but with each new book that is read, the probably of a match diminishes exponentially (I'm with César here – he and I have read so much, surely there never was nor will there be another human who has read exactly what we have read).
Artists tend to be eccentric people, but I don't think it's because art has made them strange; rather their strangeness has led them to art (as an oddball eccentric myself, I can relate to César's flaky eccentricity and I concur: one's strangeness, one's weirdness leads a person to the arts).
Sacrifice and Accomplishment
César relates his aim in writing was to write well and become a good writer, making the necessary sacrifices in order to achieve this goal, obscurely aware that once it (becoming a good writer) is attained, everything else will be throw in for free. And how does our wise man of Argentina judge excuses? Expressed with Zen-like precision: Excuses will always be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuse is valid.
Do you have a valid excuse for not reading Birthday? I certainly hope not! Assuming anyone reading this review is a good reader, your personal library will be enhanced by the inclusion of this little gem translated by Chris Andrews and available from And Other Stories.
Hang in there, César! We look forward to reading more of your books! 9780811219099 “Birthday” é um ensaio autobiográfico que César Aira escreveu a propósito do seu 50º aniversário. Tal como eu, Aira não é pessoa de balanços, mas ao contrário de mim, acreditou que este marco traria alguma mudança à sua vida, basicamente só porque sim.
I was thinking of the birthday exclusively as a point of departure, and although I hadn’t worked out anything in detail or made any concrete plans, I had very bright hopes, if not of starting over entirely, at least of using that milestone to shed some of my old defects, the worst of which is precisely procrastination, the way I keep breaking my promises to change.
O que os 50 anos lhe trouxeram ao invés foi, numa conversa banal sobre a lua, a revelação de que talvez os seus conhecimentos não fossem tão sólidos como julgava. A partir daqui, dispersa-se ao longo de 10 capítulos, falando do processo de escrita, das viagens à sua terra natal, da morte, do Juízo Final e do etnocentrismo, onde faz uma comparação, a meu ver, infeliz e politizada: que ser-se um escravo em África é o mesmo que trabalhar por um salário miserável na Argentina.
Talvez esta obra resulte melhor com quem já conhece a ficção de César Aira, o que não é o meu caso, falha que colmatarei muito em breve.
I’m the sort of person who doesn’t believe in anything. Which is nothing to be proud of, because not believing is a sign of immaturity or inexperience. If things had happened to me, I would have no choice but to believe in them. Except that I’m a maximalist and I say: Even if I saw it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. 9780811219099 Me sobreviene una pregunta. Puedo permitirme una excepción: si Aira habla de él, bien puedo escribir sobre mi hablando de Aira. Ya la frase parece complicada, no lo es, y la trama se complica sin necesidad de ningún tipo. Sucede que es muy tentador hablar de mi cunpleaños, con la vana esperanza de que Aira me lea hablando de mi cumpleaños con excusa de su cumpleaños y le pongamos así papitas a todo.
Este año cumplí años y es otro más cerca de los cuarenta. Falta, pero la cuestión es ascendente. Ahora si me cambia que una persona me diga que parezco más joven. Antes me daba igual. De atrás para adelante, en las últimas páginas de Cumpleaños, Aira habla de la juventud con candor y cariño, pero también con un dejo de nostalgia. Un mocoso de 21 años no puede saber nada de política, asegura en una página, luego en otro evoca la juventud como una versión de la belleza total que cada vez queda más atrás. Como un reflejo de uno mismo que se hace cada vez más difícil de evocar porque duele. Si este libro lo hubiese leído diez años atrás, este párrafo no me hubiese generado grandes controversias. Pero acá estamos y de paso me pregunto ¿Cómo pasó todo tan, tan, rápido?
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http://revistacharleston.com/2017/08/... 9780811219099 Hat trick. My third Cesar Aira. Now to be fair, he does write short books and if you add up the three books, they fall short of a regular sized novel. But he packs so much into one that makes up for the lack of pages. I started reading my third volume of Proust, so an Aira books falls into a tiny category. Ha ha.
This book focuses on when Aira turned fifty. I believe today he is in his seventies. Unlike a young person, who hopefully has a lot to come in the future, a fifty-year old reflects on his past. He does so by chatting with a 17-year old future writer working in a cafe, where Aira was working on one of his short books. She claims that she has done a lot in her life (Aira didn’t interrupt her). He never saw her again. Did she accomplish her goal already.
He also reflects on Évariste Galois, who on the night before a duel, wrote down his theory on mathematics. He died in the duel but his theory on polynomials and group theory has stool since 1832. Impressive. Aira notes that even with his short novels, he doubts that he could pull it off in one night. Youth has something on him.
So he ponders life as he keeps writing novels. Why? Why not? Just do it. One day life will run out. We just don’t know when. BTW, brilliant cover.
Some good things to ponder:
“The sum is a flux...You can read thousands of books and go on being ignorant...” p. 33
“A catalogue of everything that we believe, left untranslated, would make us look stupid too.” p. 36
“He who waits deludes himself because what you’re waiting for has already begun and sometimes it’s already over. That’s the nature of the present.” p. 44
“As I saw it, the only practical benefit of my favourite pastime, reading: it showed me how to find the facts should I ever be required to put them to some use, an event that this preparation rendered all the more unlikely.” p. 55
“Excuses will be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuses is valid.” p. 57
“All right, then: I know nothing. Worse: I don’t know anything. AllI know is I don’t know it all.” p. 62
That is what literature is, as I understand it: extending and extrapolating meanings into the domain of real.” p. 66 9780811219099
