The Divorce

April 15, 2021
Another fleeting glance at the deeply strange multitudes living in Aira's mind palace. In a delightful surprise, this brief novel is introduced by Patti Smith, who calls Aira "cosmically mischievous and profound." She's right; though this is just a palate cleanser for Aira, it's marked by not only his characteristically expressive language, but also his willingness to go just about anywhere with a narrative. Here, a recently divorced man named Kent--his name mentioned just once in a tale that moves at breakneck speed--decides to go to Buenos Aires for a month, leaving his daughter, Henriette, behind in Providence, Rhode Island. As he's chatting in a cafe with video artist Leticia, a new friend, the owner comes out to crank open the awning and drenches a man on the sidewalk with rainwater. The man turns out to be Enrique, who's obviously someone terribly important to Leticia. Aira always writes at the speed of sound, but the velocity here is particularly apparent, enough to be confusing at times. For a while, the narrative focuses on Leticia and Enrique and their providential escape from a fire that consumed the school where they met. Aira delves into the history of his disparate characters, especially Enrique's involvement in the founding of an "Evolution Club." Later, the tale introduces a sculptor's apprentice named Jusepe, mortally wounded by trespasses inflicted upon him in childhood. Later Aira writes: "A clarification is in order here, for it is hard to understand how temporal succession could be denied like this precisely where fashion was moving so quickly, setting its stamp on the passing seasons, months and days more emphatically than anywhere else." Among Aira's seemingly ceaseless output, this book is a strikingly effective pause in a world that moves pretty fast these days. From an often flawed and fast-moving writer, a quasi-mythological moment of reflection.

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Starred review from April 19, 2021
A chance encounter triggers a cycle of uncanny stories in Aira’s gemlike latest (after Artforum). The unnamed narrator, newly divorced, is seated outside a café in Buenos Aires with Letecia, a video artist, when a commotion occurs: a man walking his bicycle is drenched by a spill of rainfall from the café awning. Letecia recognizes the cyclist, Enrique, from 15 years earlier, when their school caught fire. In a “multidimensional phenomenon,” the pair sought refuge inside a scale model of the school itself. The narrator also recognizes Enrique—as proprietor of the guesthouse where he is staying—and another story ensues, about a friend of Enrique’s named Jusepe and his apprenticeship to a sculptor who was never seen to sculpt. Finally, the narrator turns to Enrique’s mother, seated at a nearby table, who unspools her own strange tale of strict adherence to a mysterious rule book for the running of a business she inherited. Years later her former employees, having failed to locate the rule book, conclude, “all books were the Manual, and... everyone possessed the key with which to find instructions in them.” In a dream-logic worthy of his Argentine compatriot Borges, Aira makes this notion seem plausible, and elicits a deep sense of wonder at the hidden meaning in the world’s coincidences. This prismatic, exquisitely rendered work is from a master at the height of his powers.