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Cesar Aira At Feria Internacional del Libro de Guayaquil
Nice write-up on Cesar Aira, who was speaking at the Book Fair in Guayaquil, Peru.
The piece opens with a typically modest statement from the Argentine author:
“Mientras más grueso es un libro, menos literatura tiene”. La frase fue una de las sentencias del escritor argentino César Aira (1949), durante un conversatorio desarrollado el pasado sábado en el marco de la Feria Internacional del Libro, en Guayaquil. Y el dictamen fue duro, cuestionable para muchos, pero ceñido a las convicciones del narrador no tan popular como otros de su nacionalidad, pero que en una de sus obras, Carlos Fuentes lo imagina como el primer premio Nobel de Literatura Argentina.
That is, the bigger the book, the less literature it contains (Aira's works being uniformly short). And as to the odd Fuentes reference at the bottom of that paragraph:
Sobre la referencia que Fuentes hizo en su novela, Aira comentó que se trataba de una réplica a un texto de su autoría titulado El congreso de su literatura, donde un científico decide hacer clones del autor mexicano a fin de dominar el mundo usando a un poderoso ejército de intelectuales, pero todo sale mal.
And I wonder yet again why Aira isn't bigger in the States.
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