César Aira: Canto Castrato

The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Canto Castrato. This is by far the longest novel by Aira I have read and by far the most disappointing. It is not an Aira-like novel but a fairly conventional historical novel set in Naples, Vienna, St Petersburg and Rome in the mid-eighteenth century. We follow the story of Micchino, a Neapolitan castrato, his impresario, Augustus Kette, the impresario’s daughter, Amanda and various hangers-on with brief appearances from historical characters such as Pope Clement XII and Catherine the Great. Micchino gets tired of fame and disappears. Kette finds him. Amanda has marital problems. Micchino and Co. help out. That is about it, with a bit of gossip, geopolitics, local colour galore, mild satire and chit-chat thrown in. Aira himself has not been too enthusiastic about this novel and I do not really blame him. It has not made it into English as yet and I cannot see that it will.

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