2 Books by César Aira

The Proof, written in 1989, opens with a nerdy 16-year-old girl walking at dusk down a city street thronged with other teenagers. Marcia feels herself slowing down ‘through the soft resistance of the light and darkness, silence and the glances exchanged between face and face’. Suddenly, she is crudely accosted by two lesbian ‘punks’. The […]

Trump’s Action Movies

In Hollywood action movies the good guy always wins, and America always wins. How they win varies; why they win is seldom questioned: they are, therefore they win. For the past year, Donald Trump has been running a campaign for president on the same principles: Donald Trump always wins, therefore he will win the election; when […]

Roberto Bolaño – A Little Lumpen Novelita

The scene is Rome, at some unspecified time towards the end of the 20th century. A cry of ‘Fascism or barbarism!’ is occasionally heard from passing cars. ‘Economic conditions were deteriorating…. Something was wrong in Europe or Italy, I think. Or Rome. Or our neighbourhood.’ Written near the end of his life, this was the […]

Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings

There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts off set in the Kingston, Jamaica, of the 1970s, amid an efflorescence of political violence. The two major parties, the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party and the left-wing People’s National Party, were pouring guns into West […]