GENERAL FANTASISING ABOUT BOOKS
The Famous Magician by César Aira; translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions
August 2022
Selected by Barbara Epler
Curated by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, Storybook ND is a new series of slim hardcover books that look to recreate that childhood pleasure of reading a book from start to finish in a single afternoon. As Alhadeff says, “There's nothing sweeter than to fall, for a few hours, between the covers of a perfect book.” The series, designed by Peter Mendelsund and with covers by renowned contemporary artists, consists of original works of fiction from six international authors. These books, with their riotous individual energies, take the reader from Buenos Aires to Berlin via a mysterious magician, a cyborg child and Hebridean tweed, each telling a story that’s entirely their own.
In The Famous Magician, and in a classic César Aira scenario, an author is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading and writing books in exchange for total world domination? Our hero is tempted, but is Ovanda – the horrible boor who reveals his powers and makes the offer – actually a master magician? And is his publisher also a magician? And what about his own wife? In The Famous Magician, César Aira turns sugar cubes to gold and draws giant crocodiles out of the Nile, conjuring his own magic out of thin air. – Barbara Epler
One Sunday morning, when I had already passed the age of 60 and come to enjoy a certain renown as a writer, I was strolling through the book market in Parque Rivadavia, not looking for anything in particular, just enjoying the sunshine, with no pressing tasks to fulfil or problems weighing on my mind. The sky was blue, the birds were singing, and the few trees left standing stood very still, as if frightened, each leaf precisely etched against the air. When I lowered my gaze to the earth and examined the labyrinth of green metal stands, I could see, through the gaps, in the park beyond, the havoc wrought by the storm of the night before. Hundred-year-old trees lay strewn, piled one on top of the other, their branches and foliage promiscuously tangled, exhibiting roots that looked like gross earthen sculptures of spiders or squids. Likewise, the iron park benches had been thrown into heaps of up to 20, twisted out of shape and mangled together by the power of the storm. Even the marble and bronze statues had been blown off their pedestals, no doubt all at once by an irresistible gust, and they must have crashed together mid-air, to judge from the resulting blend of body parts: the breasts of a Venus plus the legs of a horse with the three-cornered hat of a founding father, and other such weird chimaeras half buried in hillocks of mashed-up lawn. I heard one of the stallholders saying that the people living in the buildings opposite had filmed those apocalyptic dances and were uploading them to their Facebook pages. Using video-editing software, they were inserting rabbits and ducks on the pretext that those little white figures would serve as points of reference.
None of this was of much interest to me. My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasising about books. The multiplying titles opened up a wealth of creative paths, and though I knew I wouldn’t follow even one of them, their mere existence was a comfort to me. I sometimes felt that I had already read too much, and exhausted the store of books that I really wanted to read. But the desire to read was still there in me, and it was as if that desire were engendering new books, no less desirable for being inexistent. Something similar was happening with my writing. I didn’t want to know what my as-yet-unwritten books would be about; I wanted them to emerge from reality rather than my thoughts, like a clown on a spring jumping out of a box. But the problem was nothing was jumping. I hadn’t been able to write for some time: the tributaries that nourished my inspiration were starting to run dry. And without those tributaries, all I would have was the central current of my life, which I had striven so hard to keep secret. ◉