Dinner by César Aira
He writes like an improviser: never revises the page a day he produces; adds digressions and confounding details that he must then strive to incorporate into his existing plots. The reader gets to watch as he struggles to find a foothold and has the occasional near miss, like a tightrope-walker’s deliberate, theatrical stumble.
The narrator of Argentine novelist César Aira’s 2004 short story “The Cart,” himself a writer, describes the affinity he feels for an errant shopping trolley that can move on its own, “like a little boat full of holes in search of adventure.” “Even our respective techniques were similar,” he writes of the apparently banal vehicle with magical powers: “progressing by imperceptible increments, which add up to make a long journey; not looking too far ahead.”
This tendency to remind the reader of what he’s doing, seemingly while he’s doing it, is typical of Aira. He writes like an improviser: