Varamo

Translated by Chris Andrews

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.’

Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature, a light-footed experimentalist who follows a credo of improvisation and forward motion, plotting as he goes…His agenda is subversive, but his brutal humour and off-kilter sense of beauty make his stories slip down like spiked cream puffs.New York Times