Overview

‘Suddenly it hits you: you’re not twenty; you’re not young any more . . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed.’ Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the author’s knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a café and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author’s and the reader’s point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.

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9781911508403

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Reviews

Praise for Cesar Aira`One of the Spanish language's greatest writers . . . Birthday is wise in its inexactitude.' El Cultural ----`Aira's writing . . . combines brevity with so many possible meanings.' Arifa Akbar, Financial Times ---- `Aira’s novels are concerned with the phenomenology of contemporary history, which can feel both immovably stable and cartoonishly slippery- a frenzy of nonsensical inversions, one after another, like a seemingly never-ending series of little novels.’Steven Zultanksi, Frieze

Praise for Cesar Aira`One of the Spanish language's greatest writers . . . Birthday is wise in its inexactitude.' El Cultural `Aira's writing . . . combines brevity with so many possible meanings.' Arifa Akbar, Financial Times

Author Information

César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own – so far. He declared that he might have become a painter if it weren’t so difficult (“the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all”). He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, “a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.” By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but. His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luís Borges’ literature of ideas. He has been called many things: “slippery” (The Nation), “too smart” (New York Sun), “infuriating” (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of “perplexing episodes” (New York Review of Books). He’s also been called “one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today” (Roberto Bolaño) and the “most original, shocking, exciting and subversive Spanish-language author of our day” (Ignacio Echevarría). Patti Smith was “quickly seduced” when she read The Seamstress and the Wind, and admits that seeing him at a writer’s conference: “I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard”.

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