{"id":293366,"date":"2013-03-15T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/03\/15\/latest-review-the-miracle-cures-of-dr-aira-by-cesar-aira\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:46","slug":"latest-review-the-miracle-cures-of-dr-aira-by-cesar-aira","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/03\/15\/latest-review-the-miracle-cures-of-dr-aira-by-cesar-aira\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira" by C\u00e9sar Aira"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is a piece by Emily Davis<\/a> on The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira<\/em>, the most recent Aira book to come out from New Directions, and which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. <\/p>\n

Emily is a graduate of the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½’s Master of Arts in Literary Translation,<\/a> and for her thesis she translated Dami\u00e1n Tabarovsky’s Medical Autobiography<\/em>, which we hopefully will be publishing in the not-too-distant future. <\/p>\n

I can’t imagine anyone reading this blog isn’t already familiar with C\u00e9sar Aira. New Directions has published seven of his books,<\/a> including Ghosts<\/em>, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter<\/em>, The Literary Conference<\/em>, and How I Became a Nun.<\/em> And this is just a fraction of Aira’s incredible output—he’s published more than 50 works, including 2-4 every year since 1993. (According to Wikipedia, the World’s Finest Information Source.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the opening of Emily’s review:<\/p>\n

\n

Maybe I\u2019ve been watching too much Doctor Who<\/em> lately, and I\u2019m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira<\/em> refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity” and the narrator drops phrases like “all possible worlds,” can you blame me for reading this book as a sort of exercise in shaping a reality that\u2019s beyond what we would normally consider reality?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Let me back up, and let me be fair. A book that claims to be about miracles is not going to be fully grounded in reality. Or rather, it might be grounded in reality, but sooner or later it\u2019s going to move beyond, above, outside of, maybe even to someplace that\u2019s simply adjacent to reality. At the same time, those who are already familiar with C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s books know that even the most normal, most mundane circumstances are likely to be interrupted by fantastical creatures or seemingly impossible events.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The Miracle Cures<\/em> is a bit different, though. It\u2019s subtler than the blue worms of The Literary Conference<\/em>, or the armadillo-car of The Seamstress and the Wind.<\/em> It\u2019s more a meditation on what\u2019s possible and, perhaps more importantly, what makes certain things possible. The Miracle Cures<\/em> focuses more on the abstract.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Aira is no stranger to abstraction in his writing: his narratives often wander into abstract musings that can be frustrating or enlightening (or both), depending on how much mental energy you\u2019re willing to devote to them (or how coherent he\u2019s made them in the first place). Here, however, far more than I\u2019ve seen before, Aira calls himself out on it. Dr. Aira, the protagonist of The Miracle Cures<\/em>, is, as it turns out, an aspiring author. He plans to write and publish a series of books about the Miracle Cures. In writing these books, the narrator tells us Dr. Aira refuses to write in the standard, expected way: that is, using specific examples to illustrate his points. He prefers to remain in the abstract realm. Not only that, but even Dr. Aira\u2019s drawings, which can be found in his many notebooks alongside his written notes about the Cures, always turn out abstract. Very rarely and only by accident do they ever represent something recognizable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the review in its entirety.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Emily Davis on The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, the most recent Aira book to come out from New Directions, and which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Emily is a graduate of the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½’s Master of Arts in Literary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[7656,866,36566,696,50376,56,1646,6516],"class_list":["post-293366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-argentine-literature","tag-cesar-aira","tag-emily-davis","tag-katherine-silver","tag-miracle-cures-of-dr-aira","tag-new-directions","tag-review","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310756,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293366\/revisions\/310756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}