Get the latest tech news

César Aira's Magic

How the eccentric Argentine author came to occupy the center of Latin American literature.

At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, slightly ahead of candidates, such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists. Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighborhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humor; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighborhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers — all of it reminded me a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.

Get the Android app