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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
A six-year-old child sickened by eating cyanide-contaminated ice cream makes for agonies and picaresque adventures from Argentine author Aira (Adventures in the Life of a Landscape Painter), who draws on a wave of real food-supply poisonings in Latin America during the 1950s for this slim autobiographical novel. Newly moved from a Buenos Aires suburb to a rough-and-tumble neighborhood in the southern city of Rosario, the young César is taken for a first ice cream by his father. Despite its rancid taste, the father forces César to eat it, and then, in an escalating standoff, beats the vendor to death. Subsequent chapters in this elliptical, disjointed work trace César's hallucinatory stint in the hospital (where a rich fantasy life takes hold for good) while the father languishes in prison, and César's painful, delayed transition into first grade. Eventually, César makes friends with a rich boy, Arturito, and a game of dressup goes spectacularly awry, but the die is cast: César, who often cannot distinguish between dream and reality, will be a writer. Completed in 1989, Aira's near-memoir is a foreboding fable of life and art. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Aira does evoke a sense of childhood that is chilling and bittersweet — like a poisoed cone of strawberry ice cream. -- New York Times Book Review, Jascha Hoffman
Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and How I Became a Nun is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster. -- Time Out New York, Anderson Tepper
Aira's near-memoir is a foreboding fable of life and art. -- Publishers Weekly
An appealing novella, both a realisic evocation of childhood and childishness, as well as a more mature work of charming strangeness. -- The Complete Review
César Aira has created an allegory about how he became a writer, or at least about how he lost touch with reality. -- The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal
The vividness of Aira's language (expertly rendered from the Spanish by Chris Andrews) never flags. -- Bookslut, Tayt J. Harlin
This is experimental literature at its best, an exposé unlike anything else around today. -- San Francisco Chronicle, Ilan Stavans
We ... relish the stream-of-consciousness, ellipsis-laden, philosophical novella like ... we would a cyanide-free ice cream cone. -- Harvard Book Review, Cara Eisenpress
Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and How I Became a Nun is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster. -- Time Out New York, Anderson Tepper
Aira's near-memoir is a foreboding fable of life and art. -- Publishers Weekly
An appealing novella, both a realisic evocation of childhood and childishness, as well as a more mature work of charming strangeness. -- The Complete Review
César Aira has created an allegory about how he became a writer, or at least about how he lost touch with reality. -- The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal
The vividness of Aira's language (expertly rendered from the Spanish by Chris Andrews) never flags. -- Bookslut, Tayt J. Harlin
This is experimental literature at its best, an exposé unlike anything else around today. -- San Francisco Chronicle, Ilan Stavans
We ... relish the stream-of-consciousness, ellipsis-laden, philosophical novella like ... we would a cyanide-free ice cream cone. -- Harvard Book Review, Cara Eisenpress
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.7 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishing and disorganized, Dec 9 2007
By James Elkins - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: How I Became A Nun (Paperback)
The first two chapters are absolutely excruciating to read: incredibly well managed, funny, weird, tense, well conceived, and utterly bizarre. The narrator is a boy, but then again, he might be a girl: that's strange enough, because the ambiguity is managed offhandedly -- someone refers to the protagonist as "he," and someone else as "she." (The offhandedness of references to gender outdoes Yann Martel's attempt at the same insouciance.) The child is offered a strawberry ice cream. It's a special treat, because he, or she, has never had ice cream. He, or she, nearly gags on it, and Aira's description is intense and nauseating. And then -- this is only a "spoiler" for chapter 2, not for the rest of the book (and the information is available in published reviews) -- the father flies into a rage and kills the ice-cream vendor.After that utterly unique start the book unravels, or rather, Aira relaxes into a sequence of set-pieces that could have been independent short stories. It's a Bildungsroman, and you follow the little girl, or boy, through various adventures to an ending that aspires to be as willfully strange as the opening.
I'd argue that the problem here is the lingering pernicious influence of magic realism. This isn't magic realism, because nothing is supernatural, and it's programmatically unromantic and unsentimental. But it's determinedly quirky and persistently exaggeratedly eccentric, and those traits, I think, are leftovers -- echoes -- of the little frissons and surrealist pleasures of magic realism.
Aira is a stupendously talented storyteller, and I intend to read everything of his that is translated. On this case, the form is episodic for no clear reason (why not a more linear narrative, when Aira shows he's a master of it in the first two chapters?), and the eccentricities are artificially concocted. (It's amazing that Bolaño liked him, because they are so different -- that makes me rethink Bolaño.) It will be interesting to see if his other books have different strengths, or if he is caught in a structureless collages of short-form set pieces.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Aira's sublime art maybe too much for US readers..., Oct 1 2010
By Francisco Antonio Hernández Talledos "Talledos" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: How I Became A Nun (Paperback)
I'm truly convinced that US Americans readers are amongst the worst book consuming people in the Unvierse: scarcely used to read translations, when a defying ouvre like Cesar Aira's How I became a nun -superbly translated by Dr. Chris Andrews- is given to them, they try to fit it to their own rigid canon and parameters (best sellers, mystery, conventionaly narrative, airport literature, banal violence, some interesting story, a sort of life teaching moral, etc...) But Aira's art is far beyond a single weird and elegant little novel, it is a whole of small texts in which the author is determined to destroy literature to create a different kind of narrative art, something that at the end may not even have any kind of message; that is precisely what Anglo-Saxons readers can't stand: the lack the lack of message, the lack of conventionalisms, the joy of writing just for the pleasure of storytelling...
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Different from what I am used to reading, Oct 13 2010
By BookCocktails dotcom - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: How I Became A Nun (Paperback)
This book is definitely not for everyone. The author definitely challenges the reader to see if you will keep up with what he is doing. I thought the book was great, from the title, the book cover, and the content. Aira destroyed any box that suggest a book has to be written a certain way.
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