César Aira: El divorcio (The Divorce)

The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El divorcio (The Divorce). The book is about a lot of things but not divorce, except for the title and the fact that our US narrator Kent is recently divorced. Kent heads to Buenos Aires for a month and, while in a café, the owner opens the awning and soaks a passer-by. The passer-by, Enrique, turns out to know Kent, his companion and another customer and his connection with each one leads to one or more fantastical, improbable, Aira-like tales, involving Krishna, a major school fire, a drug dealer masquerading as a sculptor, a management manual which seems to be the key to all wisdom and the Chinese economy and its influence on the Argentinian economy, amongst other things. Even the water that soaked Enrique may be divine intervention. It is a wonderful, thoroughly original imaginative story, with Aira on top form.

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