As the brief, over-the-top preface by Roberto Bolaño confirms, César Aira is highly regarded in the oxygen-deprived heights of avant-garde literature. Aira is Argentinian, prolific (around 80 books published in Spanish so far) and unpredictable. These three short novels were written between 1987 and 1996 and act as tasters. Each is very different in style and subject from the others: in the first, Ghosts, a caretaker and his family live precariously in a half-built apartment block in contemporary Buenos Aires (sharing the empty spaces with ghosts); next comes An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a fictionalised biography of German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas, who explored the Argentinian pampas in the first half of the 19th century; finally, The Literary Conference is not about a literary conference (or only tangentially), but instead riffs on cloning, translation and genius before coming to a Technicolor SF climax. Aira writes at full tilt, going where the words take him (a style he calls “constant flight forward”) so that reading him is dizzying. Above all, he is concerned with the way art relates to reality and comes at this question from every angle, with the force of his fertile intellect and imagination.
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