In El Pensamiento’ is a ‘nouvelle’ focused on the memories that César Aira says he keeps for seven years and the last winter he spent in a tiny, remote town in La Pampa, Argentina before moving with his family to Coronel Pringles. …
The novelist paints us a place of four houses founded around a railway station and located in the middle of nowhere in the Pampas where his father inexplicably landed, having just come from Europe, to marry what would become his mother, a sweet and sweet young woman. shy, as well as to undertake an ambitious and prosperous business adventure.
The writer presents his father as an almost all-powerful being; like a man with very clear ideas who, as soon as he falls into those soulless places, he takes over a bakery which he transforms into a warehouse, an inn, a car wheel workshop…
The harsh exoticism of the landscape and the humility of the small town contrasts picturesquely with the appearance of an extemporaneous servant made up of some girls who responded with brutal jokes when the child demanded the presence of his mother – they told him that she had died – to burst into laughter. immediately afterwards. And in the middle of this scene bursts the figure, equally extemporaneous, of the tutor who has come from the city, a twenty-year-old boy, with an insecure and romantic character, who seems to have come out of a 19th century novel and for whom the author’s very young mother He experiences a sorrow not devoid of a certain identification in his dramatic existential orphanhood.
‘In Thought’ is a work written with a careful clarity of style; with a strange purity when it comes to telling that stage of a very particular childhood that he has. In this context, the protagonist and narrator lives or claims to live an episode that he swore to keep secret and that will give an important plot twist.
Another of the great and indisputable technical virtues that accompany the very original ‘Airana’ literature is its mastery of narrative resources to maintain the reader’s attention even though it takes him along the most bizarre paths. In that sense, the enigma of the disappearance of a locomotive plays an essential role although at the same time it serves to take the plot into a fantastic and dreamlike terrain.
#Argentina
