The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Las conversaciones (Conversations). This is another brilliant long story/short novel from Aira, about his favourite subject of the boundaries between fiction and reality. It starts with two friends talking about a trashy Hollywood film they saw the previous night on TV, with the narrator mocking the fact that a poor Ukrainian goatherd was seen wearing an expensive Rolex watch and leads on to a discussion about the plot of the film, which goes from a fairly straightforward Hollywood view of Eastern Europe to an incredibly complex film about toxic algae, flying goats, giant Cossacks and the CIA doing what the CIA do, made more complex by the fact that nether of the two saw all of the film (though both saw different parts of the film). This whole issue leads to a long (and very interesting) discussion about the border between fiction and reality and ever-changing fiction and reality, in a way that only Aira can wrote about. Another first-class work from César Aira.