Customer Reviews

How I Became a Nun

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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...

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.

A perfect introduction to Aira's compositional sensibility. His style is determinedly free-form, improvisational, purposefully simple, and spirited. How I Became a Nun is a beautiful novella full of shocking imagination and wit, and it provides a lovely window into what to expect in the rest of his work. If you are looking for straightforward plots, static character sketches, and psychological realism, consult the bestseller list. Readers inspired by singular narrative style, strong voice, and irreverent playfulness will be absolutely stunned by this little book.

I found myself utterly wrapped up in this book. The beginning and end are both cheap gimmicks, which I would have enjoyed more if the interior portion of the novel had also been a gimmick, but what other reviewers on this site have called "vignettes" or "set pieces" I saw completely differently -- as the staggeringly accurate evocation of a state of mind, a way of being.

I've rarely seen an author "get" childhood in this way. These "vignettes" are not disconnected from each other, but rather supply a view from different angles upon the same consciousness. It isn't necessary for a novel to provide a linear plot to convey a sense of narrative or momentum. In this case, the plot is accretional -- we are given a series of windows into this child's intellect and emotions at a particular point in his/her development, and it's the experience of this consciousness at an early stage that proves so gripping. It's a novel of the inner life. The gimmicks are actually rather disappointing in this context -- if the psychology hadn't been so poignantly true, the bizarro elements would have given more pleasure.

The child is six, so the gender "confusion" actually fits right in. At that age, a child is still discovering the differences between male and female, so it's understandable that sometimes the child might internally "wear" the other gender, if only to figure out the difference. It's really beside the point, since the character's gender identity has very little bearing on the events of this novel.

I think this novel portrays a stage of innocence through which we all must struggle to transition -- that strange time that comes after the acquisition of language and self-consciousness, but before the "rules of the game" have been established. We normally learn these rules from the culture in which we are immersed, but conditions may arise that frustrate this process. It may be circumstances beyond our control or it may be something in our makeup that gets in the way, so that instead of following along with the progress of other children, we may become immersed in odd pastimes or compulsive mental spaces that seem strange to outsiders but perfectly rational on the subjective level.

Just as one example (among many I could have chosen), this little girl (I'm picking one for consistency, and also because the character felt like a girl to me throughout) is constantly constructing a narrative of her life as she lives it, issuing "instructions" to some imaginary pupil for every mundane activity which she performs -- eating, walking, opening a door, looking out the window: in her mind, she will be saying, "Do it like this... never do it like that... once I did it like this... be careful to... some people prefer to... this way the results are not so..." She creates a world in her own head, in which she is the master of imaginary others, which gives her the sense of mastery she is lacking among real others. But of course, this construction is a limitation, a compulsion, a mental prison, not at all a means to freedom. It is almost painful to witness, since she is so unaware of the nature of her compensations, whereas the reader, as an adult, knows full well what she is missing and wonders how she will emerge from this childhood labyrinth. It's not inevitable that she will -- many people stay mired in their childish eccentricities, never finding the way out.

There are many more examples like that one, but the gimmicks purposefully explode all of this. I'm not sure what the purpose is, if there is one. I got the sense that the author began with the introductory gimmick because it was fun, but then found himself exploring all this interesting stuff, then got bored or ran out of ideas and needed a way to finish things off, so he came up with another gimmick and that was that. Too bad, but forgivable to me -- chapters 3-9 were brilliant enough to justify the read!

Here's a nice little excerpt, in which Cesar goes to school for the first time: "The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what happened before. So it's not surprising that I persisted in the perceptual habits I had recently acquired with Ana Modena and went on seeing gestures, mimicry, stories without sound, in which I had no part. No one had explained the purpose of school to me, and I wasn't about to work it out for myself. Initially, however, the problem didn't seem serious. I regarded it all, rather stubbornly, as a spectacle, an acrobatic show..."

I have never in my life hated a book as much as I hated this book. There have been very few artistic endeavors which I have undertaken or experienced that have aroused such passion as this one. Anything which can generate such an intense emotional response from me deserves at least four stars on this scale--I would have given it 5 stars only if I had been inspired to incinerate the text immediately after finishing it. Highly recommended for all those out there sleepwalking through literature.

I read the first few pages of How I Became a Nun and thought I had stumbled upon something great. However, I continued reading and the narrative quickly degenerated into a dizzying, disconnected hash of vignettes. Its effect on me was similar to when I had watched Mulholland Drive: certain scenes were beautiful, but by the end I was just very, very confused and a little queasy. At one point, I finally decided I must be reading about the life of a schizophrenic, trans-gendered child experiencing lengthy hallucinations, but then gave up completely and accepted my confusion as the author's intent. If you like surrealism and don't need stories to make sense, you will love this. If you like things like plots, you may want to read something else.

Aira has an eye for intrigue and mystery. Well into the story you sense some sort of confusion. The finale supends this feeling to its fullest height. Hitchcock would be dismayed.

This book is an absolute piece of excrement. I can't believe I wasted my time reading it. Not one of the characters are compelling and I was actually glad at the end result. At least my copy of the book was free. Don't waste your money, you can find my copy at the Goodwill...