The unreality of reality

El Pensamiento is also the town where Isabel González Aira, Aira’s mother, was born, and she wrote a book of stories called The thought: “a book about the place where I was born.” That is how In Thought (Random House, 2024), by César Aira, is a return to the origin, where it can be inferred that autobiographical traits of this cult author sneak in.

“Although the mother figures in the plot, the narrator says that the image he has of her is more like that of an invention, while that of the father is solid and corresponds to reality.“

Aira, who has written more than a hundred novels, mostly short ones, or nouvellesappropriates the town as a setting, whose name in itself gives it a surreal air – in tune with the hallmark of his literary work -, to build a plot not devoid of humor, lucubrations and unexpected turns. And from there comes a formula in which he uses simple, unpretentious language – not to be confused with the density of his ideas -, in which he takes fiction to extremes that border on the fantastic.

The cover of the book captures the dominant image of the narrative in which we see a man with a child, which makes us think that it is, as in fact it is, a father and a son, the central protagonists. In the background of the ocher tone you can see what would be a small train station and a locomotive intentionally drawn in white.. Although the mother figures in the plot, the narrator says that the image he has of her is more like that of an invention, while that of the father is solid and corresponds to reality.

“Life in the town, with only twenty houses at the time the events are told, revolves around the railway and the stopping station on a line that crosses parts of La Pampa.“

The narrator refers, by letting himself be carried away by the ghost of his memory, to a remote year that marked him especially when at the age of seven they announced to him and his little sisters that they would move from El Pensamiento to Coronel Pringles. The emigrant father is so enterprising that he owns almost the entire town and decides to expand his businesses to Coronel Pringles..

In that sense, so that the child does not have adaptation problems in a real school in the destination city, hire a preceptor to prepare him for his transition. They organize a picnic so that the child and the tutor can get to know each other, “a pale and inconsequential young man”who incidentally ends up being such a friend of his father that they go hunting together and, in addition, falls in love with the teacher at the town school—who seemed to be motivated by non sequitur—.

“If Aira has something, with her overflowing imagination and inventiveness, it is a desire for style, so difficult to find nowadays.“

Life in the town, with only twenty houses at the time the events are told, revolves around the railway and the stopping station on a line that crosses parts of La Pampa: “Of all the stations on the French railway that went to port, was the one with the most poetic name.” And from the poetic to the hilarious we detect that the narrator—who tells us when he is older—has many thoughts. In Thought: “He experimented, like all children, with the negation of the negation: the unreality of the unreality turned into reality.”

The fear of madness arises, of feeling on the edge of the mental abyss, saved by conscious thoughts that build a dam. Some of the child’s appreciations are a little more pragmatic, while still having the attribute of the strangeness of the author’s pen. If Aira has something, with her overflowing imagination and inventiveness, it is a desire for style, so difficult to find today: “Some big-headed ducks were moving away from the shore as I passed, giving me resentful glances.”

“The narrator considers the novel he writes more like a book of images, so it is normal for times, forgetfulness, memories, passages and inventions to overlap.“

In the midst of Aira’s frequent digressions (in this case about animals, the railway station, a word with two meanings, drawings as a form of writing or “reading”), the narrator creates expectations about an “event.” ” that is allowed to sneak in as the reading progresses, which creates intrigue in the reader.

This event is told clearly towards the end of the novel, and has to do with the ghostly white color of the locomotive that appears on the cover.. In order not to delve into details and allow the reader to be surprised by what happens there, it would be appropriate not to comment on the passage from the plausible maintained by hand to an event even beyond the fantastic.

“Part of his response sparked laughter when he stated, with his slow speech and a marked Argentine accent in English, that he had done it alone with his first work.“

One of the plots that sneak into the novel are the frequent speculations about literature and writing: “After all, literature is based on reality, and it is natural that reality sometimes reflects back on literature.” At the same time, the narrator considers the novel he writes more like a book of images, so it is normal for times, forgetfulness, memories, passages and inventions to overlap.

This last point represents a crossover with the unique writing habits of César Aira—who never gives interviews to Argentine media, only to international ones, and who always writes in coffee shops and by hand. In a crowded McNally bookstore in New York, this reviewer had the privilege of asking him if it was true that he never reread or corrected his texts or if it was a legend. The author responded, with a faint and kind smile on his face, that he wrote quite slowly since he thought about each sentence. Part of his response sparked laughter when he stated, with his slow speech and a marked Argentine accent in English, that he had done it only with his first work (Moreira), and that he realized that his book did not need rewriting because it had been “beautiful”. Irreverence as a trademark of a writer who, with his literary experiments, creates paradigms.

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Author: Caesar Aira. Qualification: In thought. Editorial: Random House. Sale: All your books.