Every self-respecting writer must take a look at this disruptive work, not only in his career, but in the generality of literature. Y Cesar Aira It was not going to be less because the avant-garde is standard. And it is not bad at all to reinvent yourself, break up and recompose yourself in creative aspects. Because not even remotely intuiting what a writer's next novel will be based on raises greater expectations.
Without even considering that everything may already be told, it is true that on many occasions it seems that the arguments are repeated or that at least they take place in parallel in certain overexploited genres. Against that evil there is an easy cure. Imagination, symbolism, the surreal or the dreamlike. Diving in depending on which spaces located in different planes has its risks but also its advantages.
The simple intention of the metaliterary offers the reader more than a reading, an experience. That is where the matter goes in this game of novels that can even be the same story that happened at different times. Just to make it always quite different.
A mature writer, worried about the depression suffered by his gardener, wanders into the recesses of an Edenic garden that hides the most disturbing secrets.
A consecrated sculptor from ancient Greece undertakes an eventful journey to an oracle in search of advice on how to treat his assistant, who is also haunted by the monster of melancholy and unease.
Finally, an ordinary man mired in the ailments of age yearns for the freedom of being hunted and escaping. For this you need to commit a crime and become a true fugitive.
El gardener, the sculptor and the fugitive It can be read as three short novels or as a three-part novel with an intricate set of variations. Around her orbit the passing of time, the loss of youth, melancholy, the artist's vanity and a reflection on the nature of literature, creation and writing itself. This unusual and unpredictable and magnetic book adds to the rich framework that constitutes the splendid work of César Aira.
You can now buy the novel "The gardener, the sculptor and the fugitive", by César Aira here:
