The reader gets to watch as he struggles to find a foothold and has the occasional near miss, like a tightrope-walker’s deliberate, theatrical stumble. He writes like an improviser: never revises the page a day he produces adds digressions and confounding details that he must then strive to incorporate into his existing plots. This tendency to remind the reader of what he’s doing, seemingly while he’s doing it, is typical of Aira.
The narrator of Argentine novelist César Aira’s 2004 short story “The Cart,” himself a writer, describes the affinity he feels for an errant shopping trolley that can move on its own, “like a little boat full of holes in search of adventure.” “Even our respective techniques were similar,” he writes of the apparently banal vehicle with magical powers: “progressing by imperceptible increments, which add up to make a long journey not looking too far ahead.”
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