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.