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: 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 image of the writer as boat-full-of-holes shopping cart seems a typically self-deprecating one, but it isn’t just false modesty: Aira’s work is full of sly references to a raft of avant-garde literary progenitors, and this one can be read as a nod to Dr. Faustroll’s boat “which is a sieve,” from Alfred Jarry’s 1911 novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. The doctor’s boat may appear useless, but, in Simon Watson Taylor’s translation, “the water’s skin tautens against the holes, and the liquid flowing beneath cannot penetrate unless the skin breaks.” Even as Aira casts doubt on the soundness of his creations, he hints at the carefully considered science that keeps them afloat.
Aira’s 2006 novel Dinner, elegantly translated by Katherine Silver and recently published by New Directions, begins in a familiar self-referential vein by lamenting the shortcomings of the narrator’s friend and host, a poor storyteller: “He’d get the episodes mixed up, leave effects without causes and causes without effects, skip over important parts, and drop anecdotes right in the middle.” For anyone familiar with Aira’s vast oeuvre—at least seventy-five novels in Spanish, with eleven translated into English to date—this serves as an arch reminder that Dinner will feel discursive and full of dead ends, and that the explanations given for events may not satisfy readers who take for granted the dictates of so-called realism.
The set-up is simple. A jobless man past middle age and his irascible mother, whom he lives with, are invited to dinner by a successful friend, a building contractor. As the host and the narrator’s mother discuss the residents of their hometown, Pringles, the narrator, bored at first, passes the time by dwelling on his dependence on his mother and his inability to forge a life for himself. But he soon becomes enthralled by his host’s unlikely anecdotes: Despite the incompetent storytelling, “there was always something fairy tale–like about the things that happened to him, which he didn’t seem to notice; he confused them with reality.” The host’s digressions, which include, for instance, one about an eighty-eight-year-old dwarf who plummets from his roof onto a patch of sage, inspire the narrator to explore his own strange early memories, which he believes must be at least partially invented, among them a massive hole in the floor of the workshop of two seamstresses, and a street excavation that once divided the road by his house “into rectangular pits, like graves.”
The dreamlike images that emerge from stories, invented memories, and gossip are matched by descriptions of fantastical objects on display in the host’s house, further blurring the line between what is real and what is invented—and that line continues to fade as Dinner progresses. The host is a collector of curiosities, mostly antique toys: A tour of the collection bores the narrator’s already fretful mother and exacerbates his feelings of inadequacy in the face of his friend’s wealth, but for the reader it’s quite a show. Particularly striking are the century-old windup toys that enact scenes of disorder. One features a corpulent tango singer who serenades a bedridden crone while innumerable white birds come out from under her bed: After a time, the singer and the birds retreat, leaving the woman alone. The degree of minute detail ascribed to the toy’s workings is delightfully absurd. A second toy depicts the story of Humpty Dumpty (or, in Argentina, Pepín Cascarón), falling off his wall. However, the familiar refrain, “All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, / couldn’t put Pepín Cascarón together again,” is followed by ad copy that claims: “Along came an Argentine with special skill, / and fixed up that egg out of simple goodwill.” And indeed, as the toy winds down, it reconstitutes Pepín and deposits him intact back on top of his wall.
Such descriptions evoke another of Aira’s professed influences, Raymond Roussel: In his 1914 novel Locus Solus, a wealthy scientific researcher named Martial Canterel takes his friends on a tour of the grounds of his villa, showing them ever more wondrous experiments, and then explaining the science behind them. He injects corpses with “resurrectine” and “vitalium,” which, in Rupert Copeland Cuningham’s translation, “released a powerful current of electricity at that moment, which penetrated the brain and overcame its cadaveric rigidity, endowing the subject with an impressive artificial life.” The resurrected corpses, jolted into motion, repeatedly reenact a significant episode in their lives. For instance, Canterel reanimates the facial muscles of Danton, who can thus orate from the dead through muscle memory alone. The host of Dinner is like a modest Canterel, only instead of explaining how his inventions work, he lets the baffling wonders speak for themselves. Aira’s devotion to the French avant-garde is underscored by the fact that the tango singer, when wound up, sings his tangos in French: “But if it was a French toy, why tangos?” The narrator leaves that detail unexplained, but the toy is clearly a tribute to Aira’s mixture of Argentine and Continental influences.
The host’s automata can’t help but prompt thoughts of dead things revived, and the disturbing eruption of the birds and the shattering of Pepín Cascarón seem to presage more chaos. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when, about a third of the way through the novel, the action is abruptly and entirely taken over by a George Romero–style outbreak of the living dead from Pringles’ cemetery, and the ensuing carnage. This is another of Aira’s games, a problem he sets for himself that he must justify and resolve. He succeeds through the sheer richness and wit of his take on the conventions of the zombie movie. The undead of Dinner don’t falter when shot in the head, and instead of brains, they feast on the endorphins of their victims, “little drops of happiness and hope.” There’s a surprising amount to eat, because “the beautiful, the rich, the young all secreted endorphins constantly,” but likewise, “the old, the poor, the humble, the sick. . . . people who hadn’t enjoyed a single moment in their entire life, had to produce tons of endorphins in order to keep that life going.” These endorphins are the novel’s second “dinner”: victims get “slurped”; two women remaining at a school fundraiser are “the last candies in the great sweetshop the school had become”; and the zombies take a connoisseur-like pleasure in those targets who are too afraid to move, “like a flower tasting, or a tasting of juicy statues immobilized by terror and surprise.”
Familiar zombie tropes are enlivened by Aira’s clever, imagistic descriptions: The implacable zombies appear here as “the spider dead,” there as “otherworldly greyhounds,” and collectively as “unshrouded goose-stepping killers.” Their attacks are relentless and brutal: When a new bride enters a church and mistakes a zombie for a statue of Christ, the creature “slurp[s] the rich little drops, a substance filled with the expectations of honeymoon, children, and a home.” Of course, such embellishments often seem to be merely the sour grapes of Dinner’s lonely narrator.
The stricken town of Pringles accepts the zombie outbreak “on a guarded level of belief,” because, the narrator tells us, “nobody likes to be the butt of a joke.” The characters, in other words, suddenly finding themselves caught in the middle of a kitschy zombie flick, seem determined not to be so gullible as to take it too seriously. It surely won’t last long: Like the host’s gadgets, which can always be wound back up to their starting point, “everybody trusts that the mechanism of the joke will have a fallback position in reality.” The zombies recede, just as Pepín Cascarón is put back together, just as the birds retreat under the bed—and as normalcy is restored to Pringles, the mechanism of Aira’s plot itself returns to its “fallback position.” The narrator wakes up the next day, and nothing in his life or in the town has changed. As a reader, how you feel about Aira’s book may have much to do with how you feel about ingeniously constructed toys. Their utility seems beside the point: Dinner itself resembles a box of tricks, and it’s no less marvelous for that.
Jon Bartlett is a writer living in Northampton, MA.
