r/NewDirections

I picked up this NDP title at a secondhand bookstore recently on a whim, and now I’m just wondering if anyone here has read it and might be able to provide some insight…

Here’s the book’s description directly from New Directions’ website:

“The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: ‘I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.’ With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine: what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your ‘countrymen’; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women’s Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of the pavilion ‘This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.’”

Thanks in advance!

“If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira… Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” — Roberto Bolaño (excerpted from “El increíble César Aira,” originally published in Entre paréntesis, 2004).

Well, I did it! I finally read my first Aira… now I only have one hundred or so more to go before I can call myself an “Aira Completist”… (/s)

In all seriousness though, have you read César Aira? If so, which book(s)?

For those of you who have yet to check out Aira, you might be wondering: ”Where does one begin?” (I’ve actually seen this very question pop up here in the community several times over the last few months).

Personally, I started with An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (published by New Directions) at the behest of u/sloweducation1, u/WhereIsArchimboldi, and u/2sweetsavage (you all might not realize it, but you definitely inspired me to seek out and read this true marvel of a novel, so thanks a million!).

Despite having only read a single work by Aira, I must say that I certainly do not disagree with what Bolaño himself had to say about the man back in 2004 (see quote above).

Let me be more direct: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter was amazing! I absolutely loved it and I’m looking forward to taking on more Aira soon! I have Ghosts and Shantytown at home, so my next read from Aira is liable to be one of the two, however, I’m super curious about How I Became a Nun as well (FYI: all of these English-language titles are published by New Directions). Which other Aira titles should be high on my list? The Literary Conference? The Hare? Something else?

In any event, so as to ensure that you all are up to speed, here’s New Directions’s synopsis of the Aira novel currently in question:

>“An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas’ trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the “physiognomic totality” of von Humboldt’s scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendoza gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense price—an almost monstrously exorbitant price—that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever read a work quite like Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter; it’s truly unique! In spite of its idiosyncratic nature, Landscape Painter resembles a rather traditional narrative, at least in the sense that it’s not highly fragmented nor structured around chapters, section breaks, or elipses. Instead, it is one single, flowing narrative, albeit broken up into paragraphs, consisting of approximately 85 pages (in English). Nevertheless, Landscape Painter is still an experimental, surrealist novel in my view, though, Aira’s form of experimentation occurs more at the sentence level, as some of the phrases he concocts and passages he stirs up are utterly unmatched in terms of novelty.

When the reader lays eyes on the text in its totality, that is, by simply flipping through the pages that comprise the novel, the structure of Landscape Painter appears deceptively straightforward. However, once one actually begins to read the text, they are met with surprise after surprise. In this vein, a particular aspect of Aira’s style that I’m just beginning to wrap my brain around is his use of “digression.”

Due to the fact that César and I are new acquaintances, I encourage you all to do your own research (straight up: just Google “Aira digression”), but in any case, allow me to attempt to put into my own words what exactly constitutes a “digression” in Aira’s oeuvre: OK, so basically you’re reading the narrative, right?, following along with the plot, getting to know the characters, etc., when all of a sudden, new sentence, Aira hits pause on relating the concrete action of the story and instead ventures off into an extended meditation on [insert heady epistemological/ontological topic here] for a paragraph or three before picking back up the plotline he suspended temporarily in order to resume telling the overarching narrative.

Such digressions are simultaneously jarring and exhilarating, as they often present the reader with delicious anachronisms that could only ever exist within the surrealist, dream logic of Aira’s literary aesthetic. Here’s an excerpt from the text that has really stuck with me since I finished Landscape Painter last week (marked appropriately for spoilers); to set this passage up for you all, what’s important to know is that the two protagonists of the novel have been tasked with representing “the physiognomy of nature” via their artwork:

>“Both of them had been making these discrete sketches with the sole aim of composing stories, or scenes from stories. The scenes would be part of the larger story of >!the raid!<, which in turn was a very minor episode in the ongoing clash of civilizations. There is an analogy that, although far from perfect, may shed some light on this process of reconstruction. Imagine a brilliant police detective summarizing his investigations for the husband of the victim, the widower. Thanks to his subtle deductions he has been able to ‘reconstruct’ how the murder was committed; he does not know the identity of the murderer, but he has managed to work out everything else with an almost magical precision, as if had seen it happen. And his interlocutor, the widower, who is, in fact, the murderer, has to admit that the detective is a genius, because it really did happen exactly as he says; yet at the same time, although of course he actually saw it happen and is the only living eyewitness as well as the culprit, he cannot match what happened with what the policeman is telling him, not because there are errors, large or small, in the account, or details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction (even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection) that the widower simply cannot see the a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife.” (73-74)

The above digression is one of many throughout the text of Landscape Painter. Nonetheless, this particular example illustrates some of Aira’s primary thematic concerns (as I see them) in the novel, namely the intrinsically imperfect nature of representation, both via the plastic arts as well as via literature, language. This is to intimate that Landscape Painter is, in part, a work of metafiction, as the narrator of the novel often reflects on the narrative while in the process of recounting it.

For me, Aira’s language in Landscape Painter is dense and borders on the baroque, albeit beautifully so; it’s also chocked full of symbolic meaning and surrealist imagery, and yet still, it’s highly readable (however, I will admit that I read this novel at a bit of a slower pace than usual). Much like Bolaño, in my view, Aira achieves a brand of literary surrealism that is plot-driven and character-forward, rather than being overly esoteric and abstruse, which frankly I believe to be the case with some contemporary surrealist authors I’ve read. So, I guess this is all to say, if you love Bolaño but have been looking to branch out, Aira just might be the writer you’re seeking!

By the way, just to put it on your radar: on July 28, 2026, New Directions will publish Five by César Aira, which is a collection of five (go figure!) short novel(la)s. At the moment, I’m thinking I’ll pick up a copy for myself, but that remains to be seen...

Anyway, have you read An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter? What about some of Aira’s other works? In either case, would you care to drop your thoughts in the comments below?

As always, thanks for reading… Peace!