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88 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
“El atractivo de las conversaciones estaba ahí: en que el otro fuera realmente otro, y su pensamiento fuera impenetrable para el interlocutor.�Que me lo digan a mí.
stories that are told or written or filmed, whether they belong to the realm of reality or fiction, have to have qualities that makes them worthwhile, because they are neither facts nor natural occurrences. a rock along the side of the road, or a cloud, or a planet does not need to justify itself with its beauty or interest or novelty, but a story does. because stories are gratuitous and have no specific function, other than whiling away the time, they rely on their quality. inventiveness has to be maximized in each instance: each time, a new rabbit has to be pulled out of the hat. one recourse they use is verisimilitude. but not a static and narrow verisimilitude, which reality itself provides, but rather "emergency" verisimilitude, the one that arrives at the last minute, like firefighters with their sirens blaring, coming to the rescue in a dangerous situation.
According to a well-conceived and well-executed constructivism, seeing half a painting should make it possible to know what the other half contained. And reading half a novel or poem, same thing. Or half a symphony. Or half a movie, right? Though speaking of "halves" could lead one to think of bilateral symmetry, which is not what this was about. It could be any fragment, even a dinosaur's worn-out vertebra.Here we finally have a literary and philosophical justification for channel surfing! He continues farther on:
Adventure was never completely squandered. Its explosions released fragments that, as opposed to all the other objects in the universe, did not obey the laws of gravity; instead, they were like miniature universes, expanding in the mental vacuum, and definitely enriching time.This, like all of Aira's short novels, is like a fragmentation grenade. One thing I can say for sure, they have certainly enriched my time reading them!
Hence, he continued, my error consisted of me having limited myself to a static concept of verisimilitude. He proposed a different, more dynamic one. According to this concept, and seen within the movement of creation, verisimilitude could be, and was, a generator of stories. […] If the goatherd in the story had a Rolex, and we had posited that the "error" had been committed, it had to be fixed, that is, made verismilar. The story's interest and novelty would emerge from such an operation. Only then would the story be rendered worthwhile. Without the "error," things narrowed considerably. Who would be interested in the coherent life of a goatherd? Or of a coherent tycoon with a big gold watch? The interest arose, a priori, from their coexistence. [trans. Katherine Silver]Somewhat to my surprise, by choosing a passage to illustrate the texture of the book and transcribing it, I begin finally to get some sense of what is being said. But it is by no means that easy when actually reading, and the philosophical juggling tricks put me into a state of dizziness pretty much throughout. Fortunately, from the one previous Aira novella that I have read, , I was aware of his interest in questioning the roles of reality and fiction—and his practice of writing himself into holes just to see if he can get out of them. But that book was tied to the life of a real person in a real place; this, by contrast, is abstract and speculative, building postulate upon postulate in a tottering tower of absurdity. It all comes crashing down at the end in a wild parody of a Hollywood blockbuster (with a curious foreshadowing of the movie Argo, which did not come out until five years later). Here, and only here, could I make any sense of the Paris Review endorsement on the cover: "A wildly funny novel." But it was a long haul to get there.