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César Aira

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. Since 1967 he has lived in Buenos Aires. He has published more than 70 books of fiction and criticism. Varamo is the seventh of his novels to appear in English translation, after The Seamstress and the Wind (New Directions, 2011), The Literary Conference (New Directions, 2010), Ghosts (New Directions, 2008), How I Became a Nun (New Directions, 2007), An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (New Directions, 2006) and The Hare (Serpent’s Tail, 1997). César Aira is widely recognised as one of the most inventive and surprising fiction writers working in Spanish today. He is also one of the freest and most invigorating.

Titles

Varamo

César Aira

112 pages
Paperback, 17 x 15 cm
Published May 2012
ISBN 9781920882860

One day in 1923, a middle-aged public servant is paid his salary in counterfeit notes; by the next morning, after a series of impossible complications which lead to a triumphant resolution, he has written a great poem.

Consumed with anxiety about how to dispose of the fake money, he ricochets from one encounter to another, with a chauffeur suspected of leading an uprising and a madman demanding payment of an imaginary debt, a comatose cabinet minister whose car has been overturned, his paranoid mother, two genteel golf-club-smuggling sisters, an obliging maid called ‘the last woman’ and three pirate publishers who finally push him to write ‘that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child.’