Birthday by César Aira

 




Hey, César! That's the way to celebrate your 50th birthday, with lots of balloons.

Unlike the other novels I read by César, one of my favorite Latin American authors, novels having characters moving through a series of happenings rendered via arc of plot, Birthday is more akin to a Spalding Gray monologue - rambling, quirky, where César offers personal reflections on his own writing and moving about within the cycle of life and death.

Other than the balloons, did César do anything special for his 50th, the marker for his treading the earth for half a century? Nope. César went on being the same old César. After all, as César reckons, authentic change comes from the most unexpected direction.

Then, several months later, feeling his usual buoyant and optimistic self, César tries cracking a joke while out walking with his wife Liliana. Hehehe. Liliana doesn't necessarily appreciate César's stabs at humor. The subject turns to the phases of the moon and it becomes evident César has always had it wrong, attributing new moon, crescent moon, half moon to the shadow of the Earth. Ahh! To be mistaken all these years.

And he's off. Shambling around with a wrong idea about the moon gets César thinking. César records ninety pages worth of thinking in Birthday, subjects and ideas that should appeal to both enthusiastic César Aira fans and those readers new to the author. Here are a batch of topics César turns his mind (and heart) to:

Talking to the Dead
César spends a week with his mother in Pringles, a small Argentine city that's a six hour bus drive due south from Buenos Aires. While writing in his notebook at a local cafe, the seventeen-year-old waitress approaches and tells César she always wanted to meet a real writer. Turns out, she writes, she couldn't live without writing since she can put down on paper what she could never say out loud.

She tells César she overcame her fear of death when her beloved brother died, the brother who became a father to her since her real father left their home forever when she was just a babe. Now her brother is still there for her, she can speak to him whenever she is in need of him. And for her, this supernatural connection is linked directly to her writing.

César recognizes her brother has taken on the role of Jesus, dead and risen, and she is his evangelist. For César, all this relates to his own experience of ideas that come to him when he first wakes from sleep – he attaches great importance to these waking ideas where you return to the world from the far side of a void, a blank, as absence, as if you are receiving a message from the land of the dead.

Magic Method to Snag Memories
“My style is irregular: scatterbrained, spasmodic, jokey.” This being the case, César, goes on to say: “The lack of a regular rhythm explains why I have to note down each idea as it occurs to me.” Oh, César, you would be all set if you could make your fantasy come true, to own a notepad (maybe an implanted microchip?) capable of capturing the hyperactivity of your brain. The best solution César came up with? Why, of course, as César states: “I became a writer and my little novels fulfill the roles of magic notepad and shorthand.”

Money to Pursue One's Art, Not Pursuing One's Art for Money
Like any true artist, César desired success ergo earnings from his writing so he could devote his time to writing. “I found life outside literature extremely difficult, so I left hardly anything outside. And yet, there's a sense in which everything is outside, from the moment I wake up till I go to bed, because I have to live like everyone else.” What César says here echoes other writer like Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley who admit they became writers since it was the only thing they were good at.

Scriptor Snips
I enjoyed the following re César's life and reading: “For some reason, I was always surrounded, in my youth, by pedants, know-it-alls and loudmouths, who were always ready to set me straight (this was my experience as well!).

" I read one book after another, two a day if they're not too long, and if they're really bad (though none of them are), I speed up in the final chapters, skipping pages: I never give up before the end – a superstition that I really ought to shed" (this is exactly my approach!).

"One personal “library” is never quite the same as another. I suppose it could be, by an unlikely coincidence, if it contained just a few, predictable titles; but with each new book that is read, the probably of a match diminishes exponentially" (I'm with César here – he and I have read so much, surely there never was nor will there be another human who has read exactly what we have read).

"Artists tend to be eccentric people, but I don't think it's because art has made them strange; rather their strangeness has led them to art" (as an oddball eccentric myself, I can relate to César's flaky eccentricity and I concur: one's strangeness, one's weirdness leads a person to the arts).

Sacrifice and Accomplishment
César relates his aim in writing was to write well and become a good writer, making the necessary sacrifices in order to achieve this goal, "obscurely aware that once it (becoming a good writer) is attained, everything else will be throw in for free." And how does our wise man of Argentina judge excuses? Expressed with Zen-like precision: "Excuses will always be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuse is valid."

Do you have a valid excuse for not reading Birthday? I certainly hope not! Assuming anyone reading this review is a good reader, your personal library will be enhanced by the inclusion of this little gem translated by Chris Andrews and available from And Other Stories.

Hang in there, César! We look forward to reading more of your books!