The Divorce by César Aira (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2023.a902829
ISSN2153-4578
Tópico(s)Evolution and Science Education
ResumoReviewed by: The Divorce by César Aira Andrew Walser (bio) the divorce César Aira Translated by Chris Andrews New Directions https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-divorce/ 96 pages; Print, $11.95 Now that César Aira has become more familiar to American readers, his name inevitably evokes a cluster of associations—prolificity, strangeness, the fuga hacia adelante. This shorthand is not exactly inaccurate, but it can lead to the wrong expectations. The emphasis on the surreal and the unrevised can make readers think of Aira's novels as beyond interpretation, when in fact they are almost always about something. It is simply that their meanings emerge in unconventional ways. The Divorce is the latest of Aira's novels to appear in English, deftly translated by Chris Andrews. It centers on a series of accidents—a sudden drenching, a mystifying fire, several unexpected meetings. One way to begin making sense of the book is to ask what the title refers to. First, and most obviously, there is the literal divorce of the narrator, Kent, and his decision to leave Rhode Island to spend some time in an unfamiliar city. Yet this literal meaning quickly opens onto others. In Buenos Aires, for instance, Kent has "the liberating sensation of being absent from myself"—as if he had been divorced not just from his wife but from a previous identity. Any book that starts "When I left Providence" should also be seen as postulating a divorce from the metaphysical realm. More subtly, the nested tales that give the novel its structure separate themselves from the flow of undifferentiated time in a kind of productive divorce. The scene that opens the book—the drenching of Enrique, the young owner of a guesthouse—isolates that moment from the [End Page 86] others and makes it a de facto center, one that "transcend[s] the temporality of the accident." It functions as a kind of makeshift eternity to which other stories can (and do) attach. One of the most striking of these narratives concerns the Evolution Club, started by Enrique in his youth after a revelatory reading of Darwin. Aira clearly intends the enterprise as a comic synecdoche for the biosphere: "Hadn't it even occurred to them that the whole world might be one giant Evolution Club, within which theirs was a scale model, a cell?" But the episode also has another function—to prime us to look for scientific imagery throughout the rest of the novel. Thus, when Kent explains the staggering quantity of moths at his old boarding school—enough to cover every surface—as due to a "natural protective mechanism very common among those species which are most exposed to predation," we cannot help thinking of the difference between k-strategists and r-strategists, familiar to any reader of Stephen Jay Gould. When we hear about the manual with which Enrique's mother runs her company, our minds go inevitably to the genome, another collection of symbols that seems insufficient to the task it performs. Her former employees pursue the manual like the Grail, or like the Man of the Book in Borges's "Library of Babel." They reason that it—like DNA—must work through "some kind of combinatory system," one whose operations give rise to infinite complexity and provide "fail-safe instructions for what to do and how to succeed in life." The Evolution Club, then, functions as a code in its own right, instructing the reader in how to find meaning in the rest of the text. The narrative delineates a pattern—in this case, evolution, survival, representation—that energizes the fiction intellectually but does not aspire to the definiteness of a proposition. Aira relies on such "conceptual ghost[s]" to hover over and haunt his works. They create a kind of cloud of significance, a technique for polysemy that he may have learned from Kafka. The meeting of Enrique and Leticia during the fire at the college is a tour de force that ranks among the best scenes Aira has ever written, reminiscent of the shootout in the supermarket in The Proof (1992) or the attack of the zombies in Dinner (2015). Apart from its...
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