THE TRANSIENCE OF IT ALL
A tiny book about the aftermath of a divorce grapples with the idea of change. It left me with many unanswered questions.
The Divorce, by Argentinian writer Cesar Aira, is one of the strangest works of fiction I’ve read in a while. If Pedro Paramo was abstruse in its take on death, the challenges in this interconnected story collection (it’s also a novella) stems from its frequent allusions to other well-known experimental works.
A stylistic change from the Ferrante fever of the last two weeks, Aira’s work is as short as it is unconventional and punchy. After a 1600-page marathon of the last two weeks, this was just 98 pages, a perfect pick for a week marked by pre-wedding events, a wedding in Sonoma and another in a Gilroy winery.
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions Publishing Corporation, the book begins rather quietly. Readers will no doubt assume they’re going to learn about the reasons for the divorce. The story gathers momentum in an unexpected manner—with the force of water, in fact—and hurtles through all the elements that make up our world—fire, earth, space, air, and water, yet again—and explodes into a prescient ending with a thunderous “aha” moment, the likes of which I’ve rarely experienced in any short story or novella.
I discovered that Aira is prolific and works in both fiction and nonfiction. According to Wikipedia, he seeks “constant momentum in the fictional narrative,” and employs a "flight forward" (fuga hacia adelante) to “improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into”. I was mesmerized by how he manages this movement in the first story of The Divorce in which fire teases, licks, singes, burns, and, finally, consumes—furniture, books, humans and an eclipse of moths.
The Divorce begins conventionally enough. A man has just got divorced; he’s anxious about the separation from his only child and for a month he has sought peace at a lodging in Buenos Aires to launch his practice of detaching himself from his child.
“Habits of leisure and relaxed sociability, without any discernible goal and all the more charming for their transience, established themselves within a few days. They were habits in the full sense of the word, as placid and reassuring as any others, but without the aftertaste of life imprisonment that habits generally have.”
What begins as the protagonist’s lament about the aftermath of his divorce becomes, oddly enough, a story about another young man, Enrique, the owner of the lodging, that then segues into the tale about the struggles of Enrique’s friend, a young man called Jusepe, whose parents abandoned him early in his life. The story about Jusepe’s descent into moral depravity—under the mentorship of a sculptor—morphs into a story about Enrique’s mother whose disingenuousness is always as clear as it is opaque. People hedge and prevaricate with such a childlike demeanor that the story of her life itself is blurred. If the mother in the tale has two faces—one riddled with five bullets and the other unfazed by them—the narrator too feels as unreliable for having used the word “murdered”, especially when the person didn’t perish from the bullets.
“Many years before, Enrique’s mother had been found dead, murdered, in the boot of a car, with five gunshot wounds to the face, arranged like the dots on the face of a die: one at each corner and one in the middle. Her hands and feet were tied, but there were no cuts or scratches or bruises. A neat job.”
Soon after we learn the story of Enrique’s mother, we return to the meeting with Enrique’s mystery woman. We subsequently return to the scene at the restaurant, El Gallego. The ending, so magical and poignant, is also a moment of realization about the pathos of The Divorce.
The nuances of this little volume are so elusive that I’ll need to read it two or three times. I doubt, however, that multiple readings will actually lead me to a deeper understanding of the text. It’s a work that presumes a familiarity with literature rich in magical realism. Throughout The Divorce, I saw hints and allusions to The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Aira’s protagonist (Kent) himself is supposedly an expert in Borges’ work.
“The story did not come to a happy end, but stories rarely do. And anyway, how could there have been an ending if the beginning was still going on?”
Every story in the book is connected to the other, but some are less obvious than the others. Still, I was captivated by the storytelling and the frequent return to pondering the physical properties of matter and the idea of transience. The characters in The Divorce are all grappling with a moment of internal or external transformation, or both, and it’s unclear how their lives will change in the future.
Every perfect moment is already unraveling into another imperfect state, and nothing is ever what it purports to be. Everything in our existence is an attempt to anticipate, savor, and capture a moment that’s all but gone. So how do we make those perfect moments last forever? How do we hold on to the best of such times? The Divorce makes us ponder these questions with respect to the stories of our own lives.
How do we make a perfect moment last? Prevent its unraveling? Artwork of every kind does that. Like that first time you hear the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s ninth. He captured “joy” in a series of notes, and builds it into a soaring commentary on the best of human existence. And all we need to do is hit play, again, to tap into that. It’s one of the reasons I bring a sketch pad with me wherever I go. If there’s a moment that needs capturing, nothing does it for me like pencil on paper. And I can revisit the feeling every time I open my sketchbook.