Browsing Slightly Foxed Books, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, UK. On a high shelf, right at the top corner, the first book in the historical fiction section is a small paperback with a landscape painting on the front.
An Episode in the Life
of a Landscape Painter
CÉSAR AIRA
“Astonishing – turns Don Quixote into Picasso”
-Harper’s
I’m interested. It is barely 88 pages long. it is small, pocket sized. the blurb hints at intellectual irreverence; philosophy, literary and art reflections. I’m sold.
It was a week or two before I started the book but once I did I was captivated. It is difficult to explain style or even subject. Reputably Aira defies genre and catagorisation. The prose was beautiful but slightly haunting. It had space but dense with reflection and description. In its way it reminded me of Proust but incredibly succinct in comparison.
The story follows a real painter of the 19th century, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and his companion, Krause, on a journey through the Andes of Chile and on into the pampas of Argentina. Evocative descriptions of these landscapes and the reflections of the painters create in the reader a sense of the drama of the journey and make one imagine being the explorer-artist oneself.
It has a very unusual narrative voice; part storytelling, part history, part diary. Told in the third person but with first person insight. outside the individuals but from within their thoughts and friendship. The reader is drawn into this asymmetric relationship to observe and analyse.
As the journey progresses the tension and mood is heightened by evidence of the passage of a swarm of locusts. The landscape is scared and the resources scarce. Rugendas sallies out but is caught in a storm and the pivotal moment in the tale plays out. Rugendas is left near death, horrifically injured, in intense pain and disfigured.
He endures with the help of his friend and copious amounts of opiates, throwing him into a cycle of lucid periods punctuated with periods of extreme torment. His life is thrown into chaos with his attacks unpredictable and extreme. He is thrust into a cycle of human and inhuman.
The friends are then caught up in an indigenous cattle raid. A rolling battle between the ranchers and the indigenous attackers unfolds around them and the artists ride out to chase the action and record it. Such is the enthusiasm of Rugendas to experience, witness and record this that he follows the ‘Indians’ to their camp in the forest; beyond the ‘civilized’ world. He is able to be among them now because he is so deformed, transformed into something inhuman, savage.
The book explores the contrasts of minute detail and grand sweeping landscapes: How this relates from art to science to society. The contrast of the civilized and the savage, the calm and the ferocious. In its short narrative it approaches being philosophy, history, fiction and poetry. Making us reflect on art, landscape, geography, society and our own selves. Themes of change and contrast tell us about permanence and flux.
The book ends with Rugendas standing before the ‘Indians’ who are feasting around the fire, deformed and horrific but accepted and fulfilled. Then, finally, we are told that Krause watches faithfully from the undergrowth, by contrast constant and calm.
Read this book.
Find it and read it.
I am now hunting down more Aira, I think I may have found my new favourite author.
Darren Ellis is a teacher, creative and owner of Rotten Poetry. He reads classic literature, fantasy, sci-fi, literary fiction and history.