Overview

Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation A recently divorced man trying to enjoy himself in one of the trendier districts of Buenos Aires finds himself at the centre a series of strange coincidences. These blips in causality are at first easily rationalised, but soon escalate from the merely implausible to the impossible to the cataclysmic. More, each accident of fate, piling one atop the other, drags a new, rambling tale in its wake, until the very ground beneath the man's feet seems likely to buckle beneath the weight of so many shaggy dogs. And yet, with master storyteller Cesar Aira holding their leashes, what better vacation from reality could any reader-or divorce-desire?

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9781913505042

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Reviews

'The Divorce outlines the process for those wishing to comprehend or to experience the expansive possibilities of a single moment. That is his wondrous gift, and The Divorce is the personification of that gift . . . It is certain that The Divorce will leave you breathless.' Patti Smith ----'Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop.' Roberto Bolano ----'By the time this miraculously dense book has reached its conclusion, Aira has wheeled through the gothic novel, noir, sci-fi, family saga, social satire. It is almost impossible to believe the text occupies only 115 pages . . . Reading The Divorce is like witnessing an explosion, or the birth of an alphabet.' David Kurnick, Public Books ----'His unpredictability is masterful.' Rivka Galchen ----'Sui generis is really the only way to accurately describe Cesar Aira. He's by turns a realist, a magical realist and a surrealist - and therefore not really any of them. Anything can happen in an Aira novel, and almost everything does.' Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times

Author Information

Cesar Aira is a translator as well as the author of around eighty 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 Luis Borges' literature of ideas. He has been called many things: 'slippery' (The Nation), 'too smart' (New York Sun), 'infuriating' and a writer of 'perplexing episodes' (New York Times). He's also been called 'one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today' (Roberto Bolano) and the 'most original, shocking, exciting and subversive Spanish-language author of our day' (Ignacio Echevarria). Patti Smith was 'quickly seduced' when she read The Seamstress and the Wind, and admits that, seeing him at a writer's conference, she was 'so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard'. Chris Andrews has translated books of fiction from Spanish and French, including by Roberto Bolano, Cesar Aira, Selva Almada and Kaouther Adimi. He has also published two collections of poems: Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair. In 2019, his poem 'This is the Crow with the Broken Caw' won the TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize.

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