Reading César Aira to discover I have been in dire need of something like this: a hundred pages of rare and rich uncertainty: what next and why, all known frames dissolved and resurrected all the time. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter begins sedately, in the early nineteenth century, testing our patience for history, forcing us this way and that.
"Rugendas' second and final voyage to America lasted seventeen years, from 1831 to 1847. His industrious journeying took him to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil again and Argentina, and resulted in hundreds, indeed thousands of paintings."
"Travel and painting were entwined like fibres in a rope. One by one, the dangers and difficulties of a route that was tortuous and terrifying at the best of times were transformed and left behind.... Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once."
By page seventeen he has me. I read most of the book over a cloudy afternoon and a sleepless night; finished it just now. The ending is orchestral. The artist Rugendas, after horrendous and delirious experiences, all the nerve-endings of his face open after a gory accident, finds himself in Indian wars; he wears a mantilla even as he sketches, reminds me of Paddy Shine up at the Lodgefest a few years ago, behind a mantilla or similar, black, as he drummed into his next move, which was just then, and then some.
Also, Pierre in the film of War and Peace, watching from a small rise above the pitch, bespectacled, writing notes on the Battle of Austerlitz.
What we bring to our reading of anything is multitudinous, subtle.
César Aira is excellent at reminding us of that.
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