Two by Aira

On Cesar Aira's "Festival & Game of the Worlds"

The Argentinian novelist César Aira puts out a book a year, and usually more than that, though the total number, like the number of characters across Balzac, remains contested; his Wikipedia page boasts a “partial bibliography” that still requires quite a bit of scrolling just to get through. Spanish readers can probably barely keep up with Aira’s output, let alone those who choose to translate his work, and so us readers in the Anglophone world get a slow drip year after year as his translators work through the backlog. New Directions has put out about one a year stateside since 2006, with a couple Airan double releases to make up for any years they skipped; even at that pace, they’ve got miles to go before they sleep, and an interesting dilemma – which one next? This time around they’ve decided to throw two novellas together, their choices combined for no other reason besides “César Aira wrote them” and the unfortunate market reality that “standalone novellas don’t really sell.”¹ Festival was originally published in Spanish in 2011, and Game of the Worlds in 2000; they have similarities, of course, because the same prodigious mind created them, and because holding up any two things next to each other will make any human’s dastardly pattern-seeking brain to form connections, but really this is just two good and interesting novellas put together for pure pleasure’s sake. (If you want to stretch, science fiction as a genre is considered in both, but most of Aira’s books play fast and loose with genre and convention.) Maybe the two in one packaging helps clear the queue a little bit too, but that’s all the better for us. Katherine Silver, who translated these two, gets the flowers for performing the literary service for us this year; judging by the trends, Chris Andrews might tag back in next year, or maybe Nick Caistor (though he’s usually handling the UK side), which means it takes somewhere around three translators to even start to keep up with Aira.

Spanish cover

The slippery nature of the ineffable and the pure inexplicability of art is at the center of Festival. The novella follows a film festival in an unnamed city; the curators and programmers of the festival have built the entire thing around the Belgian postmodern filmmaker Alec Steryx, who is at once being feted in a career retrospective and also meant to judge the films in the rest of the festival. Steryx has an extremely packed schedule, but, surprising the programmers, he brings along his 90 year old mother, who has no interest in films or the festival but noisily insists on accompanying him to every single event. There’s one punchline that Aira loves, and repeats like the rake joke in The Simpsons: Steryx and the festival organizers trying to get somewhere quickly, and Steryx’s mother, refusing a wheelchair, taking for-e-ver to do the simplest tasks. This is especially frustrating for Perla, the director of the festival and a Steryx superfan; she’s not only under pressure to keep the festival running smoothly and successfully, but she also desperately hopes to spend some focused time with Steryx to discuss his work. She’s written the first book on Steryx’s films, and wants to find a way to run her theories by him, but the mother constantly impedes all progress: they’re late to every screening and leave every party early.