by César Aira
I found this novel by Argentine author César Aira to read on this first leg of our Patagonia trip, and was delighted to find that also fits one of my favorite genres: books about books. The premise: an aging author who is kind of burnt out on his writing career is offered the devil’s bargain of magical powers in exchange for never being able to read or write a book again for the rest of his life. There was my cliffhanger!
I finished it before I could even blink —- hadn’t noticed that it was only 96 pages long, so more of a novella, really. I appreciated the wry voice of the narrator, and the slightly mind-bending thought experiment that was the premise, but in the end I just couldn’t really tell if it was supposed to be mild magical realism, or just kind of a farce.