THE DIVORCE

Another fleeting glance at the deeply strange multitudes living in Aira’s mind palace.

In a delightful surprise, this brief novel is introduced by Patti Smith, who calls Aira “cosmically mischievous and profound.” She’s right; though this is just a palate cleanser for Aira, it's marked by not only his characteristically expressive language, but also his willingness to go just about anywhere with a narrative. Here, a recently divorced man named Kent—his name mentioned just once in a tale that moves at breakneck speed—decides to go to Buenos Aires for a month, leaving his daughter, Henriette, behind in Providence, Rhode Island. As he's chatting in a cafe with video artist Leticia, a new friend, the owner comes out to crank open the awning and drenches a man on the sidewalk with rainwater. The man turns out to be Enrique, who's obviously someone terribly important to Leticia. Aira always writes at the speed of sound, but the velocity here is particularly apparent, enough to be confusing at times. For a while, the narrative focuses on Leticia and Enrique and their providential escape from a fire that consumed the school where they met. Aira delves into the history of his disparate characters, especially Enrique’s involvement in the founding of an “Evolution Club.” Later, the tale introduces a sculptor’s apprentice named Jusepe, mortally wounded by trespasses inflicted upon him in childhood. Later Aira writes: “A clarification is in order here, for it is hard to understand how temporal succession could be denied like this precisely where fashion was moving so quickly, setting its stamp on the passing seasons, months and days more emphatically than anywhere else.” Among Aira’s seemingly ceaseless output, this book is a strikingly effective pause in a world that moves pretty fast these days.

From an often flawed and fast-moving writer, a quasi-mythological moment of reflection.