How I Became a Nun [Paperback]

César Aira (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2007

A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream.

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.

A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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Review

“Completed in 1989, Aira's near-memoir is a foreboding fable of life and art.” (Publishers Weekly )

“An utter faith in his fabulous tales is all this author can offer…such marvelous fantasies.” (Douglas Messerli, Otis College of Art & Design )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (February 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811216314
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216319
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #166,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing and disorganized, December 9, 2007

By 

James Elkins (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aira's sublime art maybe too much for US readers..., October 1, 2010

By 

Francisco Antonio Hernández Talledos "Talledos" (Mexico City, Mexico) - See all my reviews
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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...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different from what I am used to reading, October 13, 2010

By 

BookCocktails dotcom - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.