Little Buddhist Monk

César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own – so far. He declared that he might have become a painter if it weren’t so difficult (“the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all”). He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, “a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.” By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but.His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luís Borges’ literature of ideas. He has been called many things: “slippery” (The Nation), “too smart” (New York Sun), “infuriating” (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of “perplexing episodes” (New York Review of Books). He’s also been called “one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today” (Roberto Bolaño) and the “most original, shocking, exciting and subversive Spanish-language author of our day” (Ignacio Echevarría). Patti Smith was “quickly seduced” when she read The Seamstress and the Wind, and admits that seeing him at a writer’s conference: “I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard”.

'Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop.' Roberto Bolano --------- 'Hail Cesar!' Patti Smith --------- 'Aira writes at full tilt, going where the words take him (a style he calls "constant flight forward") so that reading him is dizzying.' Jane Housham, The Guardian ---------- 'Bewitching and bewildering ... Compulsively readable ... Aira's writing - with its equal measures of rich complications and airy whimsies - combines brevity with so many possible meanings, or none.' Arifa Akbar, Financial Times --------- 'Surreal and intriguing ... a drama is as fun as it is mystifying.' The Guardian --------- 'A work of literary trigonometry. The prose bounds along with a gleeful spring in its step, dragging the improbable story behind it ... If you're happy to have your buttons pushed, then you'll fall for this shaggy-dog-story-on-shrooms, and fall hard.' Roger Cox, The Scotsman --------- 'Funny, poetic and wonderfully readable ... Idiosyncratic and vivacious, The Seamstress and the Wind reads more like an afternoon in the pub with a dreamy Eddie Izzard than a sit-down session exploring prose form with Eimear McBride, and is all the better for it.' Big Issue --------- 'Sophisticated and energetic writing which will leave you scratching your head with curious wonder ... I admire the sheer uncompromising audacity and verve of this novel.' The Lonesome Reader ---------- 'Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald.' Mark Doty, Los Angeles Times ---------- 'It works as a piece of art whose fresh, gorgeous images carry rich meanings about the nature of transformation. But it also works as a story that makes you miss your subway stop.' Electric Literature