César Aira: La cena (Dinner)

The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La cena (Dinner). This is Aira’s zombie novel. The narrator, a sixty-year old, never married bankrupt man, living with his mother on her pension, and the mother go to dinner with a friend. The mother and friend gossip about the people in the town, past and present, and then the friend shows them various curiosities he has in his house, of which the mother does not approve. That evening, while the narrator is channel surfing, zombies rise en masse from the cemetery and attack the town, sucking the endorphins from the brains of the inhabitants. They kill many and badly damage the town but a solution is found, connected with the events of the dinner that evening. It is not quite your standard zombie novel, primarily because of the way the zombies are controlled, but it is certainly one of Aira’s most unusual works.

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