"El mal de Aira": The novel that parodies and celebrates César Aira, the eternal Nobel candidate

“César Aira once responded to my email.” Thus begins El mal de Aira , the debut novel by Colombian filmmaker, screenwriter, playwright, and writer Andrés Restrepo Gómez . Published by the Spanish label Barrett, the story follows a young Colombian literature fanatic who, along with a friend and accomplice in his reading adventures, decides to invite the celebrated Argentine author César Aira to the Medellín Book Fair . That's just the trigger for a plot that, as if concocted by the eternal Nobel Prize candidate himself from Coronel Pringles, unravels and re-entangles again and again.

Over the course of 124 pages, Restrepo Gómez – a resident of Buenos Aires – deploys a series of narrative procedures that could be described, without exaggeration, as Airean: parody, delirium, monologue in bursts, digression, absurdity, realism and fantasy living side by side, improvisation, vertiginous rhythm and a playful style close to the Oulipo spirit.

An example: "At this point, you might be wondering about the private vault where I keep my copy of In Thought. Fortunately, despite being a defaulting debtor, the people at the Italian Hospital were able to keep me a spot in a safe shared with a pastry union member, through a co-payment that, to this day, I religiously transfer during the first five days of the month."

“Aira continued publishing books, and my finances were dwindling at a rate that not even the most aggressive cancer could deflate a belly,” writes Restrepo Gómez in astringent, corrosive prose.

The narrator (a sort of alter ego of the author) goes through altered states: reading Aira. Selling Aira. Contacting Aira. Sending him an email. Buying him a gift. Setting him on fire. Rereading him. Being Aira. His obsession reaches levels that border on devotional parody: everything he does, narrates, or desires is permeated by the figure of a writer who transforms as the novel progresses.

The narrative, structured as an intimate diary intervened by fictions , is filled with meditations on Aira's work tinged with oscillating emotions: from enthusiasm to disappointment, from envy to admiration.

Restrepo Gómez compares his style to the cinema of Chilean Raúl Ruiz, and reflects on Aire's conception of literature as conceptual art: "His defense of art for art's sake, which in essence is nothing more than the human and sovereign right to escape, to not be in any way indebted to reality, moved me to tears."

There are also seemingly trivial observations that become signs of an aesthetic obsession : “I like that Aira's appearance doesn't at all resemble the archetypal writer. I've never seen him in a suit. I've never seen him in a tie, not even when he won the Formentor Prize in 2021.”

César Aira has not only generated fans, detractors, and hundreds of critical pages. He has also generated a variant within literature that could be a genre in itself: the Aira genre. Titles such as The Last of César Aira, by Ariel Idez, or Aira or Death , by Daniel Mecca, can be included within this genre. Aira's Evil joins this tradition with originality and delirium.

Some passages reach the most lucid absurdity. Like when the protagonist discovers that Aira is a SpongeBob SquarePants fan and wants to give him the seasons on DVD: "I reflected on how, in Aira's work, the realistic staging of surreal episodes resembled the disgusting close-ups that occasionally appear in SpongeBob SquarePants." Another tragicomic moment occurs when he runs into a possible doppelgänger of the author of Ema, the Captive, in a bar.

But the novel's greatest appeal lies in its escapades and deviations. In that space where it no longer matters whether Aira is inventing a new one or simply inventing something. There's no point in Googling it.

You must surrender to the delirium of a narrator who constructs a meta-literary artifact: a novel that can be read as a diary of obsession, a coming-of-age story, or a literary adventure comedy. A novel that, although it seems written only for the initiated, is also open to those who have never read Aira.

“I myself am still waiting for another email. Not from you. Not from anyone in particular. I am still waiting for the idea of email as the ultimate harbinger of happiness: the lamp where the Genie lives,” the protagonist writes.

In that wait, filtered by obsession and delirium , the spirit of this book could be synthesized and summed up, in other words, with a phrase by Charly García: “I love you. I hate you. Give me more.”

Aira's Evil , by Andrés Restrepo Gómez (Barrett).