¿Acaso no podemos pasarnos la vida tratando de entender la frase que dijo nuestro padre, allá en los tiempos remotos, la única vez que rompió el silencio? ¿Por ejemplo, la vida al revés? ¿O dándole vueltas, entre las mareas de ficción y realidad, a eso que partió nuestra infancia en dos? Algo de esto nos comunica esta crónica del niño peronista bajo los efectos del Tilo Monstruo en la plaza de Pringles: el recuerdo, o la invención, que es lo mismo, de aquellos episodios en los que, entre las brumas de la primera infancia, la alternancia de estilos y leyendas -los familiares, y también los históricos- moldeó, tal vez para siempre, nuestra imaginación y el nervio óptico con que el que miramos y nos figuramos el mundo.

The Linden Tree
By Cesar Aira
2003/2018

Originally published in Argentina, written in 2003 thus reflective and charming novella is a walk through the memories of a young man's childhood, it could be Aira life.....
It is a story of the love he felt for his father, a man who every day traveled to the linden tree to gather the linden flower to make a tea for his deformed and deranged mother....
Riveting. Recommended. ( )

Why Cesar Aira Does Not Write Books

I had been reading Aira's novels as they were translated, but I stopped a couple of years ago. "The Linden Tree" is unusual, and now I need to use the present perfect progressive instead of the past perfect progressive: I have been reading Aira, I might still read Aira. It's difficult to get the tense right because Aira's novels inspire a kind of wavering devotion. I have decided that what wavers is my interest in the books as units.

His short novels are famously improvisational and unstructured, so finishing one isn't quite like finishing a normally structured novel: you may feel the book ended on page twenty, or that you've just read a fragment. Both can be true. All hundred or so of Aira's books can be imagined as a single book, although that's more an abstraction than an idea that could make sense in detail. And every one of his books continuously begs the question of why it keeps going, why it doesn't wrap up, why the author thinks the new material he's just introduced fits with what came before.

These questions are part of the experience of reading Aira. There is a generous interpretation available, which many of his reviewers adopt: you can say this is a variant of magic realism (or, more generally and accuraely, surrealism), so every unexpected anecdote is an expressive surprise. Or you can say that Aira is a late practitioner of stream of consciousness writing, so every turn in subject matter is to be valued as an expression of the author's inimitable imagination.

These are unhelpful diagnoses because they make it impossible to criticize any of Aira's narrative decisions. If every unexpected juxtaposition of images is surrealist, then any narrative assemblage can be expressive. If every surprising turn in the storyline is a reflection of the author's vivid fantasy, then none can be criticized for being less authentic.

In fact, people stop reading Aira because his narratives can get tiresome or uninteresting. He veers unpredictably, but the veering itself is predictable. These are ways of registering that neither the surrealism nor the stream-of-consciousness is working. He has achieved some wonderful things by writing the way he does, without planning and without revising, but he has also produced a body of work that is either immune from criticism or in serious jeopardy of being ignored.

"The Linden Tree" is unusual in that it's autobiographical. As reviewers have noted, it begins with a story about the undependability of the narrator's memory. He could check part of the memory by visiting the town where he grew up, but he can't be bothered. (He's too "unscientific.") Besides, he says, the subject of his memory--a linden tree--has been cut down (pp. 4-5). On the other hand, his entire life has been a series of "multicolored distractions" from the memory (p. 7). One reviewer of the English translation picked up on this and proposed it as the book's theme: the unreliability and crucial importance of memory.

But the book isn't about the tree. At the very end the narrator returns to the linden tree, but that's just a sop to narrative closure. I can't imagine a reading in which those closing pages are satisfying: they don't address or explain what's happened in the 80 pages in between. It's difficult for me to imagine that Aira thought much about what he was doing at the end, except finishing "The Linden Tree" to get on with the next novel: otherwise he would have had his narrator talk about how ineffectual the last few pages are.

So what characteristics of Aira could keep me reading? For me it's the moments when the narrator, and implied author, struggle to make sense.

Here is an example. Early in the book Aira is talking about his father, who was an incompetent electrician.

"My father's continual trips all over town on his bicycle were a kind of allegory of Electricity's invisible flight to the farthest corners... But if you think about it, everything is allegory. One thing signifies another, even the fact that I have ended up becoming a writer and composing this true account." [p. 24]

Of course it's not true that "if you think about it, everything is allegory," but the logical leap barely registers because right away it's clear that Aira is mainly interested in linking his father's profession to his own. It's also patently untrue that everything in the book is "true." There are a number of episodes that couldn't have happened as he describes them, and many more than couldn't have been experienced as he describes them, because they happened to a young boy. So the passing assertion that the account is true reads as a trick: he doesn't want us to think too much about it, and he presumably doesn't want to think about it too much himself. (That would be too "scientific.")

The passage continues:

"To follow the prompts of allegory, which also works by remote control, I too could be practicing a trade for which I am quite unqualified, manipulating objects--memories, for example--of which I know and understand nothing, in a state of utter puzzlement. But that doesn't alter the reality of the facts: my father was an elecrician and I am a writer. These are real allegories."

That last sentence, I think, doesn't make sense. The penultimate sentence does (he is a writer), but it doesn't have anything to do with his story or with allegory. Aira often writes himself into these corners: he theorizes a lot, but he also loses interest in his theories, doesn't link them together, and lets himself happily be led into stories that don't fit any theories.

It's normal to lose the thread of your own thought, or to propose a theory and then get confused about it, or to launch into a new subject in hopes that it will reveal why it's pertinent. Few people think in a linear way or keep to a single level of abstraction or concreteness. The many passages in Aira's books that simply enact or exemplify this daily incoherence are sometimes entertaining but in the end uninteresting. What keeps me reading is passages like the one I quoted, where the narrator is struggling to figure out what makes sense, and how. And this means I won't be reading books by Aira, but I'll be reading in books for certain passages. It's not that I've given up on what he is doing, it's that I understand that by its nature it isn't a project that results in books.

A novella really, but incredibly dense nontheless. What may be a fictionalized version of the authors own life. A black father, who was an ardent Catholic before he became a Peronist, seems he couldn't be two things at once. His deformed, overly dramatic mother with her thick glasses and outlandish idea. His town called Pringles, and yes I thought of the potato chip brand every time he mentioned the name, his friends there, his teachers. Free flowing thoughts, one blending into the next as he describes their lives under Eva Peron. A time when the poor were encouraged to think they could rise to the middle class.

As I said very dense, and I know I probably missed the significance of much, not being overly familiar with this time period. This is, I suspect, that needs a second reading. I believe this is one of those books that one would notice more and more, if read more than once. Right now all I can say was that while I found it interesting, I probably missed more than I took in. ( )