Customer Reviews

The Hare

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Aira is a superstar in the literary world in South America. People from Chile and Argentina to Colombia and Mexico read him; by contrast in the U.S. he seems to be read only by a small number of people, and mostly in universities. (I'd be happy to be contradicted here; this is my experience.)

This is not his best book. "How I Became a Nun" is as wild and wonderful as novels ever get, and "An Epidose in the Life of a Landscape Painter" is just as good. But this is a wide-screen, panoramic epic odyssey, and Aira has filled it with all sorts of set pieces: battle scenes, allegorical journeys, "Pilgrim's Progress" episodes, a visit to the underworld, digressions into politics, and so forth. A lot of this is the familiar machinery of nineteenth-century novels. It's still wonderful, and I still recommend it, but Aira is one of the best writers in any language, and you wouldn't guess that from most of this book.