Not everyone’s cup of tea, certainly, but very few can write their way out of a corner better than Aira.
Twenty hallucinatory, open-ended short stories by Aira (Shantytown, 2013, etc.), an Argentinian master of improvisational writing.
Reading Aira's work can give you the feeling of being swept up in a flash flood and carried along whether you're ready or not. It’s certainly constant momentum that marks this collection of work, written over the past decade or so—stories begin in the middle, spin on a dime and are often as warped as a Salvador Dalí landscape. The opener, “A Brick Wall,” joins stories like “The Infinite,” “The Two Men” and the title tale in remembering (or dis-remembering) a childhood in Argentina but also paying testament to the enduring strangeness of a child’s imagination and sometimes mocking the author's own literary reputation. “Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples. I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example,” Aira writes in “The Infinite.” On the flip side, “The All That Plows through the Nothing” finds the first-person narrator working out in a gym, eavesdropping on local housewives and ultimately offering a tender but also funny meditation on aging and death. “Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature,” he writes. Then there are the stories that are, as they say, completely different. For instance, “God’s Tea Party,” in which the creator regularly celebrates his birthday with a lavish affair to which only apes are invited as "a kind of deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed at a human race that has disappointed Him.” Or “A Thousand Drops,” in which drops of oil paint from the Mona Lisa run off to start creative lives of their own. Or “Poverty,” a love letter that anthropomorphizes the condition of being poor into a constant companion.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, certainly, but very few can write their way out of a corner better than Aira.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2029-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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