The Divorce

The Divorce by César Aira (2010) I’ve read three or four books by César Aira—I find these short books irresistible as books—inspiring objects that I love. Because I’m an idiot, I’m attracted to really short, small books, and ridiculously massive, long, heavy ones—while finding 300 page novels and short story collections much less attractive (I can’t quite say off-putting). Also idiotic is that I didn’t write anything about this book immediately after finishing it—some time ago—and now, looking over it, I may as well be trying to extract messages from concrete. Let’s see—a guy’s meeting someone at a café—and at the moment some water is accidently dumped on a guy on a bicycle—several stories are launched simultaneously. Of course, we can only get to them one after the other. The one I remember liking most is about a woman with no business experience successfully running a company by using this mysterious “manual” and nothing else—which made me think about all people in power or important positions—and what their days might be like, and how many of them might be getting by with a version of paint-by-numbers or the Cub Scout handbook—or who knows? I’m sure there were a lot of ideas in the book that made me think of seemingly unrelated topics—I just wish I’d written my thoughts down. One funny observation I recall is that it felt like these were actually short stories, but he was using this weird device to present them as a novel—but if so, why? It’s still very short as a novel—and he’s published books of short stories. Well, anyway, I liked this okay, but least of the books of his I’ve read—but still, I’m looking forward to reading the next one I get my hands on.

5.11.24