Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months reading and discussing books by a single author. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. Our first pick is the acclaimed Argentinian writer César Aira. This month’s book is Shantytown.
Maxi—a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown—attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone (including two innocent teenage girls) to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a secret code within a carousel of pirated lights, the kindness of strangers, murder…
No matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “season of aira” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States. One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was short listed for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
* * *
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86527584674?pwd=bjNRMThTNFJrZ0ZDUWtya3RHU0RjZz09
Meeting ID: 865 2758 4674
Passcode: 089337
