Aira’s Literary Conference

A whirl of work, itinerant cold symptoms, and travel preparations slashed into my reading time over the last couple weeks… but I did manage to read and finish a novella, César Aira’s The Literary Conference, Katherine Silver’s translation of El congreso de literature. The Literary Conference is short and full of offbeat surprises -- plus I’m getting ready to go to a literary conference of sorts myself, the London Book Fair -- so I’ll keep this post brief, too.

The Literary Conference is a wonderfully metaphysical short novel told by a man, (not) coincidently named César, who is a translator and a scientist with a unique cloning method. He goes to a literary conference, which the reader barely sees, with the goal of cloning a Mexican writer. Of course the project goes haywire in a very dramatic and odd way.

The book’s plot is fun and unpredictable, blending genres, but I enjoyed César’s thought process, which often appears random, even more. The Literary Conference begins with César’s story of how he found pirate treasure. He says it wasn’t genius that enabled him to solve the long-time mystery of the treasure:

What happened (I shall try to explain it) is that every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is.

César goes on to relate this thought to the books we read, which made me happy because this is something I think about all too often. Indeed, who reads the same sets of books? And how do those odd combinations affect our thinking? Then there’s this, which César mentions while his clone incubates. This sums up my state of mind as I prepare to travel and finish up this post at Logan Airport:

For someone who travels as little as I do, for someone who leads a very routine life, a trip can make an enormous difference; it is the objective equivalent of cerebral hyperactivity.

I think the attraction of The Literary Conference comes more from the charm of César’s quirky voice, thoughts, and combination of experiences than a single brilliant idea or conclusion. Even if César’s mind sometimes feels a hair too hyperactive, this short book contains lots of enjoyable scenes and observations. The Literary Conference is on the shortlist for the Best Translated Book Awards; I don’t read Spanish but thought Silver’s translation read very nicely, capturing and creating a voice.

I’ll leave analysis of the book’s “translations” and narrative shifts to M.A.Orthofer of The Complete Review. I think he does a nice job summing up the book without revealing too much.

Up Next: I have no idea! Probably something I find in my travels…

Disclaimer. I received a review copy of The Literary Conference from New Directions, a publisher with whom I have discussed translations. Read the first pages of the book here.

What Price Discipline?: Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline

I seem to have a habit of calling books “atmospheric” when I damn them with faint praise: “atmospheric” feels like a code word for books with lots of detail and texture but very little story. But Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, an account of boarding school translated by Tim Parks from the Italian I beati anni del castigo, is different. At only 101 pages with lots of white space, Sweet Days of Discipline is just short enough, just long enough, and just elegant enough to feel complete as – here, I’ll say it – an atmospheric portrait of a young woman and her surroundings.

Our first-person narrator is a teenage girl sent to school in post-war Switzerland. She has a German roommate because her mother requested it; the narrator disdains the roommate and imagines her meeting dates in her sleep. Sweet Days of Discipline contains all sorts of early warnings that this isn’t a heart-warming tale of high school camaraderie: we learn in the first paragraph that writer Robert Walser walked nearby and died in the snow. On page two, the narrator tells us she remembers only Baudelaire from her study of French literature. I wrote “uh-oh” in the margin.

Flowers of evil, indeed: our narrator has girl crushes (or maybe something deeper?) on beautiful, perfect new girls, first Frédérique, later Micheline. What hides behind the perfection? Life at school, the narrator tells us, involves establishing “a façade, a kind of double life” – she even emulates Frédérique’s handwriting. Sweet Days of Discipline contains lots of other creepy little details, like the comparison of boarding school with a harem and reading “a few lines of Novalis about suicide and perfection.” Frédérique is described as a nihilist, and we confirm toward the end of the book that not all is right in her world.

Then there’s all that discipline and obedience. The narrator speaks of the pleasure of disappointment and sadness in her life, and wonders if the discipline of religious school, where she was a boarder at the tender age of eight, might have been the best years of her life. She also finds pleasure in obedience… This is a short book, so I’ll leave things at that, though I would love to tell you about the book’s very last sentence.

I probably wouldn’t recommend Sweet Days of Discipline to readers who prefer fiction with strong stories and plots, but I think those who enjoy eerie character sketches will love it. Enigmatic somehow works for me here, and Sweet Days of Discipline succeeded where Maile Chapman’s Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto (previous post) did not. Though both books concern females – not all of them stable – living and interacting in restrictive, closed places, in Parks’s translation, Jaeggy’s writing is spare, wonderfully restrained and, yes, disciplined, giving this novella a poetic beauty as it describes life’s dark corners.

And now I’m curious about Robert Walser…

Disclaimer: I have discussed literature in translation with New Directions, the publisher, but received Sweet Days of Discipline from a friend in a book trade. Thank you, Daisy, and enjoy the baking!

Up Next: Michael David Lukas’s Oracle of Stamboul.