There is a scene in VARAMO in which the protagonist, whose name supplies the novel's title, finds himself in a café seated at a table occupied by three book publishers. They're a cynical bunch. One of them encourages the inexperienced Varamo to try his hand at writing:
"In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produce their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their first book was their strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote."
The prescription Varamo receives from his tablemates is this: First, write down some story notes. Then, "write out the notes one after another with some commentary in between. Try not to tidy them up too much; immediacy is the key to a good style."
Only a handful of César Aira's fifty-plus novels have been translated into English, which means it's impossible for non-Spanish readers to identify his best work. Yet from the pattern of the available work it's beginning to look like Aira, despite his fecundity and his omnivorous instincts, is following the advice of the publisher in the café: This mad creator writes only one novel -- and VARAMO is such a one.
The book, set in the Panamanian city of Colón in the year 1923, moves through a single evening and night experienced by a timid and lovelorn 50-year-old Panamanian civil servant. As is his common practice, Aira's "notes" are strung into a somewhat disjointed but ever forward-moving "chain of events." Improvisation is the order of the day.
Varamo leaves work after receiving his salary which, he notices with alarm, consists of two counterfeit 100 peso notes. He returns home to care for his paranoid mother. Up in his lab he works on a taxidermy project. Back on the street, on route to his favorite café, he watches an automobile competition known as a "regularity race." He stumbles upon a conspiracy to overthrow the provincial government. He reacquaints himself with a former romantic interest. Reaching the café, he receives tips about how to succeed at the writer's trade. When midnight strikes he finds himself wandering the deserted town square where he comes face to face with a transformative vision, an epiphany at once "interesting and poetic, a `writerly' experience." He understands that from that moment on everything would be "writerly" for him. At the novel's end, Varamo goes home to assemble the bits of this day into a long and soon-to-be renowned poem.
VARANO's narrative "notes" are interrupted periodically by Aira's trademark asides -- discursions that sometimes reach the level of mini-essays. These engage a broad range of disciplines including economics, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy (especially the mystery of time), and postmodern literary strategies. As always, Aira is fascinated with cycles, reversals, switchbacks, dichotomies (tropical exuberance vs. impeccable formality; abstract vs. concrete; the imaginary vs. the real). Paradoxes and oxymorons abound: "transparent labyrinths"; "he had continued to move within his paralysis"; Varamo was "nostalgic for the present."
The unsuspecting poet Varamo and (I suspect) Aira both savor inconsistency. If, early on, Varamo and Aira observe how "light was what made the world work," they are free later to declare, "Money is what ultimately moves the world." They have their prejudices: Aira, for example, has a special dislike for bureaucrats: "Like nearly all public servants, [Varamo] didn't do anything special to earn his salary." If a certain dryness overcomes Aira's mixed-bag aesthetic, it does not prevent the author from inching close to sentimentality, formally expressed: "The most awkward aspect of individuality was being left out of the shared understandings that create social bonds."
The text of VARAMO, smoothly translated by the veteran Chris Andrews, occupies a mere 124 pages. These pages are not divided into parts or chapters -- all the better to sustain the momentum Aira so values. On the final page Aira indicates the date of the book's completion: 15th of December 1999. Like Varamo, the author was on that day 50 years old.
When designing VARAMO, the publishers corrected a problem some readers (I among them) had with
The Seamstress and the Wind, whose text is set in a painfully small font size (please see photos uploaded to the Customer Images area in the upper left of the VARAMO product page). For readability and pleasure, the nod goes to VARAMO.
