Varamo (NE)

My novels start from an idea, from some kind of intellectual game, from something that seems promising and challenging, César Aira once admitted. Ideas that, as is well known, often border on the outlandish or the unheard of. "Between the good and the new, a thousand times the new," is one of his mottos. It is not surprising, then, that his work celebrates invention and uses, as a starting point, singular cases or incidents, sometimes trivial, other times decidedly implausible. The first pages of Varamo are enough to understand what this particular case is about: in 1923 an obscure, almost Kafkaesque official writes a poem in ten or twelve hours; the event is a prodigious "bubble in his biography" because he had never written or even thought of a single verse before, nor would he afterward. The poem in question is the masterpiece of Central American modern poetry: "The Song of the Virgin Child." In a gesture very characteristic of Aira, Varamo does not correct or retouch his poem, which is published in book form days later. What follows is the "unfolding": the study of the events that occurred from the moment Varamo collected his small salary, pocketed the bills, and noticed they were counterfeit, until the moment he put the finishing touch on his celebrated poem. In other words: "what relationship can there be between a couple of counterfeit bills and a literary masterpiece?" Between lie and truth, Varamo's action takes place in a ghost-Panama. Emulating Alfred Jarry, it could be argued that Varamo "is set in Panama, that is, Nowhere." Or say Everywhere, with that kind of universality found in every fabulist and which, as noted here, can also prove more than propitious for an ironic anti-fabulist. Eduardo Berti