FICTION

Varamo

New Directions, dist. by Norton. 2012. c.96p. tr. from Spanish by Chris Andrews. ISBN 9780811217415. pap. $12.95. F
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Varamo, a fiftyish Panamanian bachelor civil servant, has just been paid 200 pesos in counterfeit currency and doesn't know what to do about it. So he wanders through the city of Colón, encountering numerous eccentrics, until he runs into three publishers in a café who urge him to write a book on his hobby, taxidermy. With no previous writing experience, he pens a poem, "The Song of the Virgin Boy," which ends up becoming one of the most celebrated masterpieces of Central American poetry. Instead of dealing with embalming, however, the poem is a re-creation of the events that happened earlier that day, pieced together from notes, an ironic apology of the writing craft.
VERDICT This delectable novella by prolific Argentine author Aira constantly pulls the reader's leg, heightening the absurdity in a playful, desultory style reminiscent of magic realism. At about the novel's midpoint, the author directly intervenes by discussing his theory of narratology, the fruit of which he claims is in the reader's hand. For those who like writing in the vein of García Márquez and other masters of 20th-century Latin American literature.
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