César Aira - Böcker
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I en grekisk koloni på 400-talet f.Kr. får den unge, fattige poeten Perinola ett storslaget uppdrag: den inflytelserike statsmannen och filosofen Parmenides vill ha hjälp att skriva en bok som ska rymma all hans kunskap och livsvisdom. Perinola väntar ivrigt på att få börja skriva, men för varje möte blir det alltmer oklart vad boken egentligen ska innehålla. Parmenides talar i gåtor, svävar på målet och skjuter upp diktamen gång på gång. Perinola ställs inför ett val: Ska han själv hitta på vad han ska skriva, eller ska han fortsätta att ta emot lön och tillbringa dagarna i de fina salongerna tills Parmenides kommer till skott?
Parmenides är en absurt humoristisk roman som säger något innerligt om skrivandet och människans fåfänga önskan att till varje pris bli ihågkommen.
CÉSAR AIRA (född 1949 i Coronel Pringles, Argentina) är en unik figur i litteraturvärlden som läses med stor fascination världen över. Han har givit ut över 120 böcker sedan debuten på 70-talet. De senaste åren har han intervjuats i såväl Babel som Vi Läser och fått ett allt större anseende även här i Sverige. I vårt växande Aira-bibliotek samlar vi pärlorna ur hans stora författarskap i screentryckta mjukband i ett lite mindre format, formgivna av Sara R. Acedo.
DJORDJE ZARKOVIC översätter från spanska, danska samt serbiska, kroatiska och bosniska. Han fick priset Årets översättning 2019 för sitt arbete med Dubravka Ugresics Räven.
181 kr
Tillfälligt slut
En ungkarl i sextioårsåldern är tillsammans med sin mamma hembjuden på middag hos en förmögen och rätt skrytsam bekant i den argentinska staden Coronel Pringles. När han kommit hem igen slår han på den lokala tevekanel där han får se en chockerad programledare rapportera om att de döda börjat stiga upp ur sina gravar och nu är på väg mot staden. Men är det en mardröm, eller var det något med maten? Eller händer det på riktigt?
Argentinaren Cesar Aira (född 1949) är en unik figur i litteraturvärlden. Sedan 70-talet har han givit ut över 120 böcker och skapat en genre som är helt hans egen: korta, ofta runt 100 sidor långa romaner om udda personer som stångas med lika udda idéer. Han är experimentell, ironisk och oförutsägbar och säger själv att hans sätt att skriva är en ständig flykt framåt, med vilket han menar att han improviserar sig fram och aldrig blickar bakåt. I den spansktalande världen betraktas Aira som en av de största i sin generation och 2021 tilldelades han det prestigefyllda Formentorpriset.
Djordje Zarkovic översätter från spanska, danska samt serbiska, kroatiska och bosniska. Han fick priset Årets översättning 2019 för sitt arbete med Dubravka Ugresics Räven.
187 kr
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Med minnet som nyckfullt raster återvänder César Aira till sin barndom -- närmare bestämt till det sista året han tillbringade i den lilla byn El Pensamiento i provinsen Buenos Aires. Där, under tillvarons sömniga yta, börjar språkets och fantasins världar att veckla ut sig för den sjuårige pojken, samtidigt som han försöker komma underfund med de vuxnas märkvärdiga liv.
I byn El Pensamiento är en skimrande vacker och bedräglig barndomsskildring, där Aira visar hur minnet inte bara bleknar med åren -- det kan också öppna dörren till något större, något som bara fiktionen kan fånga.
CÉSAR AIRA (född 1949 i Coronel Pringles, Argentina) är en unik figur i litteraturvärlden som läses med stor fascination världen över. Han har givit ut över 120 böcker sedan debuten på 70-talet. De senaste åren har han intervjuats i såväl Babel som Vi Läser och fått ett allt större anseende även här i Sverige. I vårt växande Aira-bibliotek samlar vi pärlorna ur hans stora författarskap i screentryckta mjukband i ett lite mindre format, formgivna av Sara R. Acedo.
DJORDJE ZARKOVIC översätter från spanska, danska samt serbiska, kroatiska och bosniska. Han fick priset Årets översättning 2019 för sitt arbete med Dubravka Ugresics Räven.
83 kr
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90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksIt is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals… But then something goes appallingly wrong.This is one of Aira’s great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.
229 kr
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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
207 kr
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The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."—Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.
143 kr
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Unmistakably the work of César Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo “hadn’t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one.”Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet’s vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game.
159 kr
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"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course." — from GhostsGhosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.
157 kr
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A delightful fictional memoir about César Aira's small hometown. The narrator, born the same year and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as César Aira, could be the author himself. Beginning with his parents—an enigmatic handsome black father who gathered linden flowers for his sleep-inducing tea and an irrational, crippled mother of European descent—the narrator catalogs memories of his childhood: his friends, his peculiar first job, his many gossiping neighbors, and the landscape and architecture of the provinces. The Linden Tree beautifully brings back to life that period in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Perón, aspired to a newly created middle class.As it moves from anecdote to anecdote, this charming short novella—touching, funny, and sometimes surreal—invites the reader to visit the source of Aira's extraordinary imagination.
157 kr
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Before you know it you are no longer young, and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was changing—and then, just as suddenly you realize that you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—but the birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. In Birthday Aira searches for the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes ,and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and meditates on literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, on ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible.
159 kr
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In nineteenth-century Argentina, Ema, a delicate woman of indeterminate origins, is captured by soldiers and taken, along with with her newborn babe, to live as a concubine in a crude fort on the very edges of civilization. The trip is appalling (deprivations and rapes prevail along the way), yet the real story commences once Ema arrives at the fort, where she takes on a succession of lovers among the soldiers and Indians, leading to a brave and grand entrepreneurial experiment. As is usual with Aira’s work, the wonder of the book is in the details of customs, beauty, and language, and the curious, perplexing reality of human nature.
170 kr
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Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone — including two innocent teenage girls — to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay... no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.
142 kr
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César Aira’s newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality — his weaknesses,whims, and pet peeves — is summed up in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very special gift for miracles. He no longer cares about miracles,however, and has no faith in them. Perhaps he is even a little ashamed about his supernatural powers. Such is Dr. Aira, who also has to confront his arch-enemy— chief of the Piñero Hospital, Dr. Actyn — who is constantly trying to prove that Dr. Aira is a charlatan. Poor Dr. Aira is indeed a worker of miracles, but César Aira — the magesterial author — sends the very human doctor stumbling toward the biggest trap of all, in this magical book.
157 kr
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One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living—all somehow, disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party.
157 kr
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Daily conversations in outdoor cafés with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera’s goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men’s uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot — involving a mutant strain of killer algae — to take over the world! The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and surprisingly touching.
159 kr
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The Little Buddhist Monk is a story of Asian invention gone wild, as a diminutive Korean Buddhist monk acts as a tour guide to an increasingly distraught French couple on a working vacation in the Far East. The Proof brings us quickly back to the West, where two punks, plus a new recruit (“Wannafuck?” is the opening line as the two punk lesbians accost the chubby and shy Marcia on a quiet street in Buenos Aires), take control of a local supermarket with dire consequences for the hostages. These two Aira works are as different as night and day. Nevertheless, sex, identity, and modern day economics figure deeply in both of these fast-paced, edgy fictions.
197 kr
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A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'") strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park: "My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least of our hero's problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the insufferable boor Ovando—"a complete loser" but a "man supremely full of himself: Conceit was never less justified." And yet, is Ovando a master magician? Can he turn sugar cubes into pure gold? And can our protagonist decline the offer Ovando proposes granting him absolute power if the writer never in his life reads another book? And is his publisher also a great magician? And the writer's wife?Only César Aira could have cooked up this witch's potion (and only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)—a brew bubbling over with the question: where does literature end and magic begin?
157 kr
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Artforum is certainly one of César Aira’s most charming, quirky, and funny books to date. Consisting of a series of interrelated stories about his compulsion to collect Artforum magazine, this is not about art so much as it is about passionate obsession. At first we follow our hapless collector from magazine shops to used bookstores hunting for copies of Artforum. A friend alerts him to a copy somewhere and he obsesses about actually going to get it—will the shop be open, will the copy already be sold? Finally he takes out a subscription, but then it never comes, so he hounds the mailman. There’s the day his stash of Artforums gets rained on, but only one absorbs the water. And interspersed is a wacky chapter about the mystery of the broken clothespins. “How weird.” “How crazy.”
130 kr
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The Divorce tells about a man who takes a vacation from Providence, R.I. in early December to avoid conflicts with his newly divorced wife and small daughter. He travels to Buenos Aires and there, one afternoon, he encounters a series of the most magical coincidences. While sitting at an outdoor café, absorbed in conversation with a talented video artist, a young man with a bicycle is thoroughly drenched by a downpour of water seemingly from rain caught the night before in the overhead awning. The video artist knows the cyclist, who knew a mad hermetic sculptor, whose family used to take the Hindu God Krishna for walks in the neighborhood. More meetings, more whimsical and clever stories continue to weave reality with the absurd until the final, brilliant, wonderful, cataclysmic ending.
159 kr
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By profession I am a soldier, a general in the glorious Roman army. As a playwright, I think of myself as a sublime amateur.In Cesar Aira’s new novel, Fulgentius, a sixty-seven-year-old imperial Roman general—“Rome’s most illustrious and experienced”—is sent to pacify the remote province of Pannonia.He is a thoughtful, introspective person, a saturnine intellectual who greatly enjoys being on the march away from his loving family, and the sometimes deadly intrigues of Rome. Fulgentius is also a playwright (though of exactly one play) and in every city he pacifies, he stages a grand production of his farcical tragedy (written at the tender age of twelve) about a man who becomes a famous general only to be murdered “at the hands of shadowy foreigners.” Curiously, what he had imagined as a child turns out to be the story of his life, almost. As the playwright-turned-general broods obsessively about his only work, the magnificent Lupine Legion—“a city in movement” of 6,000 men, an invincible corps of seasoned fighters wearing their signature wolfskin caps—kills, burns, pillages, and loots their way to victory. But what does victory mean?
- Nyhet
326 kr
Kommande
Five, selected from over 100 untranslated novels and stories by “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer), brings together—each an astonishing work—Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill. Following a cast of dreamlike characters including cyber nuns, a young princess forced to be a hack translator, a news-paper vendor, and General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, Five shows the many facets of Aira’s multifarious mind as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions.Five is a must-have for Aira’s legion of devoted fans around the world and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated. A satisfyingly hefty installment from this “exquisite miniaturist” (WSJ) and writer whose “cubist eye sees from every angle” (NYT); because “once you start reading Aira, you don’t want tostop” (Roberto Bolaño).
169 kr
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In Festival, the genius postmodern sci-fi filmmaker Alec Steryx is the star guest of a film festival in an unnamed country. But he’s brought a surprise: his nonagenarian mother. Everyone is baffled: Why? Half-blind and terminally cranky, she does nothing but complain, despite insisting on attending every screening and reception. As Steryx’s mother gums up the works for the festival organizers, larger problems are in store … A delightfully baroque comedy of errors, Festival, is, all at once, a loving parody of the institutions that support artists, a meditation on postmodern art, and a propulsive, lyrical, surreal adventure. In the far, far, future, a middle-aged father has fallen behind the times. Bemused and disturbed, he watches his children play the eponymous Game of the Worlds, a Total Reality war game that involves the annihilation of countless alien civilizations—which are at least as real as the narrator’s own. As he debates the ethics of the game, struggles with his home’s “intelligent system,” and fumblingly manipulates his Discourse Corrector (a dead ringer for ChatGPT) on virtual beachside dates, an errant thought threatens to set a world-ending chain of logic into motion: the return of the Idea of God… Epic and domestic, madcap and musing by turns, this prescient novel reads like a message in a bottle from a bewitchingly strange yet all-too familiar future.
145 kr
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In a small town in Argentina, a seamstress is sewing a wedding dress. All of a sudden she fears that her son has been kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. She gives chase in a taxi. Her husband finds out and takes off after her – to the end of the world, to the place where monsters are born, and where the southern wind falls hopelessly in love.
145 kr
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Marcia is sixteen, overweight and unhappy. One day, as she's walking down a Buenos Aires street, she hears a shout: 'Wannafuck?' Startled, she turns round and is confronted by two punk girls Lenin and Mao. Soon, she's beguiled by them and the possibilities they open up. But the two have little time for a philosophical discussion of love: they need proof, and with their own savage logic the duo, calling themselves the Commando of Love, hold up a supermarket as the novel climaxes in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.
145 kr
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In Korea, a little Buddhist monk (really very dwarf-sized) dreams of the Western world and secretly reads up on Western culture. When he meets the holidaying French couple Napoleon Chirac and Jacqueline Bloodymary he offers his services as their guide, in the hope they will take him, a penniless monk, to Europe. He whisks them off on a tour of the temples. Among the many twists and turns, our stunned tourists encounter a suicidal horse and discover that a person can also be a robot. Though our monk appears to them as the very spirit of tourism, nothing is natural in this tour de force of Aira's twisted imagination.
145 kr
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Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of his hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator - who could well be the author himself, although nothing is guaranteed in a book by Cesar Aira - suddenly recalls the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his father would take him to gather the lime-flower blossoms from which he made tea. Beginning with his father, handsome and `black' and working-class, and his strikingly grotesque mother, the narrator quickly leaps from anecdote to anecdote, bringing to life his father's dream of upward mobility, the dashing of their family's hopes when the Peronist party fell from power, the single room they all shared, and his mother's litany of political rants, which were used - like the lime-flower tea - to keep his father calm. Aira's charming fictional memoir is a colourful mosaic of a small-town neighbourhood, a playful portrait of the artist as a child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's own extraordinary imagination.
108 kr
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‘Suddenly it hits you: you’re not twenty; you’re not young any more . . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed.’Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the author’s knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a café and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author’s and the reader’s point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.
120 kr
Skickas
Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation PrizeShortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation ‘It is certain that The Divorce will leave you breathless.’ Patti SmithA divorce leads a man to Buenos Aires. In a trendy cafe he witnesses a minor accident involving Enrique, the owner of his guest house; this accident reunites Enrique with a childhood friend, with whom he had miraculously escaped from a raging fire in a miniature replica of a boarding school. So starts a true master-yarn from Booker finalist Aira.
110 kr
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200 kr
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