The Divorce

15 June 2021

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

César Aira (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

With a Foreword by Patti Smith

Description

With a preface by the irrepressible Patti Smith, The Divorce is a delightful book of several short amazing stories of chance meetings, bizarre circumstances, and even stranger visions of alternate realities written as only César Aira can

The Divorce tells about a man who takes a vacation from Providence, R.I. in early December to avoid conflicts with his newly divorced wife and small daughter. He travels to Buenos Aires and there, one afternoon, he encounters a series of the most magical coincidences. While sitting at an outdoor café, absorbed in conversation with a talented video artist, a young man with a bicycle is thoroughly drenched by a downpour of water seemingly from rain caught the night before in the overhead awning. The video artist knows the cyclist, who knew a mad hermetic sculptor, whose family used to take the Hindu God Krishna for walks in the neighborhood. More meetings, more whimsical and clever stories continue to weave reality with the absurd until the final, brilliant, wonderful, cataclysmic ending.

Reviews

"[A] fleeting glance at the deeply strange multitudes living in Aira’s mind palace...marked by not only his characteristically expressive language, but also his willingness to go just about anywhere with a narrative." — Kirkus

"This prismatic, exquisitely rendered work is from a master at the height of his powers." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Sui generis is really the only way to accurately describe César Aira. He’s by turns a realist, a magical realist and a surrealist — and therefore not really any of them. Anything can happen in an Aira novel, and almost everything does." — Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times

"We come full circle, to the 'delicate machine' that put everything in motion. In someone else’s hands, this might feel like a trick, but in Aira’s it is magical." — Sheila Glaser, New York Times Book Review

"The Divorce is a masterful demonstration of focused imagination. Aira chronicles overlapping coincidences, layering memory with temporality and injecting magic into the mundane to create a kaleidoscopic tale of serendipitous meetings that rumbles like an avalanche down a mountain, gathering speed and power as the novel progresses. With lightness and verve, Aira twirls the macro with the micro to create a singular novel whose story turns and turns again until it comes full circle, like “that ‘little steel fairy,’ the bicycle, from whose spinning stories are born." — Alex Crayon, World Literature Today

Also By: César Aira View all by author...

  • Festival & Game of the Worlds

    César Aira, Katherine Silver

    Paperback, 2024

    Oddly twinned masterpieces by one of the greatest fabulists of any age: past, present, or 40,000 years in the future
  • Fulgentius

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    Paperback, 2023

    Aira holds a fun-house mirror up to the genre of historical fiction in this novel about an aging Roman general on what may be his last campaign into the provinces.
  • The Famous Magician

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    Hardback, 2022

    A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
  • The Famous Magician

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    E Book, 2022

    A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
  • Artforum

    César Aira, Katherine Silver

    Paperback, 2020

    One man’s obsession with Artforum magazine takes us on a hilarious journey to the ultimate meaning of the very creation of art

Also By: Chris Andrews View all by author...

  • I Don't Care

    Ágota Kristóf, Chris Andrews

    Paperback, 2024

    Never before translated short stories—“stark and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle)—by the legendary genius Ágota Kristóf
  • Fulgentius

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    Paperback, 2023

    Aira holds a fun-house mirror up to the genre of historical fiction in this novel about an aging Roman general on what may be his last campaign into the provinces.
  • The Famous Magician

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    Hardback, 2022

    A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
  • The Famous Magician

    César Aira, Chris Andrews

    E Book, 2022

    A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
  • Our Riches

    Kaouther Adimi, Chris Andrews

    Paperback, 2020

Also By: Patti Smith View all by author...

  • Woolgathering

    Patti Smith

    Paperback, 2021

    An ode to childhood and to “woolgathering” as the wellspring for a creative life—now in an expanded paperback edition
  • A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat

    Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Louise Varèse

    Second Edition, E Book, 2012

    A reissue of Rimbaud’s highly influential work, with a new preface by Patti Smith and the original 1945 New Directions cover design by Alvin lustig.
  • The Coral Sea

    Patti Smith

    Paperback, 2012

    Before the National Book Award-winning Just Kids, Patti Smith addressed the life and passing of her intimate friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
  • Woolgathering

    Patti Smith

    Hardback, 2011

    The National Book Award–winner Patti Smith presents a treasure box of a childhood memoir about “clear unspeakable joy” and “just the wish to know.”
  • A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat

    Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Louise Varèse

    Second Edition, Paperback, 2011

    A reissue of Rimbaud’s highly influential work, with a new preface by Patti Smith and the original 1945 New Directions cover design by Alvin lustig.

Paperback

9780811230933

127 x 178 mm • 96 pages

£8.99

Add to Basket

Ebook

9780811230940

Powered by Glassboxx

£8.99

Add to Basket