Philadelphia City Paper // An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-06-22/cover5.shtml

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
By César Aira;
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions, 120 pp., $12.95

For such a small book, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter has an awful lot to say. In it, the Argentine author César Aira takes as his subject the very nature of artistic representation and how perception itself can change drastically amid events of personal and political upheaval. He writes here in a documentary style befitting of his protagonist, the 19th-century German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, who followed an expedition to Mexico, Chile and Argentina to capture and document in scientific detail the still-unspoiled landscapes. As you might guess, he and his trusty sidekick Krause quickly find themselves in a series of scrapes and misadventures worthy of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, though these — involving locusts and lightning and Indians — are more terrifying than any windmills.

Without giving too much away, a disfiguring calamity strikes Rugendas, but it's one that provides an entirely new way of seeing the natural world around him. The novel reads like an old-fashioned adventure story for boys rewritten by some malcontent art historian over at PAFA. It's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that Aira, as the author of over 30 books, identifies in some way with his hero's efforts to render the visible world into some semblance of artistic order. "The precise arrangement of physiognomic elements in the picture would speak volumes to the observer's sensibility, conveying information not in the form of isolated features but features systematically interrelated so as to be intuitively grasped: climate, history, customs, economy, race, fauna, flora, rainfall, prevailing winds." In his ability to so startlingly describe the tension of culture clash in Latin America and render complicated history into such lovely and succinct prose, in An Episode Aira makes even Gabriel Garcia Márquez look like a pinata full of hot air.

Philadelphia City Paper // Bornholn Night-Ferry by Aidan Higgins

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-06-22/cover5.shtml

Bornholm Night-Ferry
By Aidan Higgins
Dalkey Archive Press, 175 pp., $12.95

Aidan Higgins has to date published a dozen volumes of fiction and non, including this letter bomb of a book, Bornholm Night-Ferry, which first appeared in the U.K. over 20 years ago and has finally now washed up on our shores. Admirers of the fictions of James Joyce and his most immediate descendents, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, will want to take notice of this steadily growing oeuvre because in terms of language Higgins' best fiction definitely converses with those giants of Irish literature. In some ways a traditional epistolary novel, Bornholm Night-Ferry unravels through a series of letters back and forth between Finn "Fitzy" FitzGerald, and his Danish lover, Elin Marstrander. Their correspondence takes on a life of its own, seemingly independent of the mundane realities of their separate, shacked-up-with-other-people lives.

Higgins masterfully uses subtle and, I admit, sometimes not-so-subtle shifts in tone and syntax to convey carefully nuanced changes in the lovers' emotional dispositions. He is by all reasonable accounts an amazingly cunning linguist. The unabashed eroticism of their early letters only slowly gives way to the understanding that Finn and Elin's affection is so ephemeral that it may not survive the occasional, yearned-for reunion. The idea of their affair means more to them than the affair itself. "I love the language," Elin writes early on to Finn, "my own and others, the language as tool, the language which is keeping or effacing, the language you can come to the truth with or be lying with. I needed the words to entertain you, to amuse you, put my seal into your heart so you can never forget me." Their loving correspondence is ultimately about language itself, and it's the language itself that makes this melancholy novel so enjoyable.