Een episode uit het leven van een landschapsschilder

by César Aira

Other authorsAdri Boon, Johann Moritz Rugendaz

Paper Book, 2020

Status

Available

Call number

0.aira

Genres

Fiction

Publication

User reviews

LibraryThing member JimElkins

A stupendous novel, a real achievement in a very brief compass. Aira is a strange and somewhat scattered novelist -- I am not sure if he has control over his forms, and sometimes, as in "How I Became a Nun," he seems to want to relinquish control -- but his pace, his wit, his descriptions, and even

his philosophic asides are tremendous. He is genuinely surprising. It's not just the plot twists that took me by surprise, it was individual descriptions and sudden parenthetical comments.

An aside on philosophic asides. This book is full of them, but none are over 1/2 page long. they aren't laboriously planned and unfurled with trumpet fanfares, like some of Milan Kundera's. They aren't faux-philosophy -- dogmas and cliches masquerading as paradoxes and profundities, as in Cees Nooteboom or Javier Marias. And Aira's philosophic asides aren't arch, ironic, and elliptical, as in Umberto Eco. When Aira wants to say something about representation, reality, expression, or communication, he does so brilliantly and quickly.

As an art historian, I wouldn't recommend this for understanding nineteenth-century painting, although there is some good material on Humboldt's theories of nature. No: it's fiction, and very inventive, odd, and unpredictable. If Aira can discipline himself the way Pynchon did to write "Gravity's Rainbow," he will be one of the principal novelists of the next few decades.

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12 more

LibraryThing member stillatim

This is really short, and really great; it'll make you think and it'll grow on you over time. Nice.

LibraryThing member RossWilliam

Aira's prose was a bit dry and his rhythm was hard to find. The first twenty or so pages were a total loss and in a book this short I was unsure things would turn around. However things do pick up and the story has some intresting themes about art and life and the interaction between man and

nature. The book hinges on one all important life changing event that is a bit hoaky but definately the most well written portion of the book. The book is short, under 100 pages, so it is a quick read that will be most interesting to someone with a love of art and/or nature.

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LibraryThing member JimmyChanga

Part fiction, part non-fiction, part poetic description, part philosophy. Aira examines the depths of history, the meaning of repetition, reproductions and its role in art, compensation, and much more, and in the context of a very specific, relatable person and his predicaments. Often zooming into

an idea or description with intense precision, then moving on, this book is able to contain big ideas without sounding pretentious, or bloated. In fact, the entire book is less than 90 pages, though it tells a story that could be told in 500 pages. It's really some of the best writing I've read. Also, I had no idea it wasn't a completely true story, because it was told as if it was pieced together from accounts and letters. But there were points where he could not have been so intimately in the character's head. Only after I read it did I find out that this is a perfect combination of history and novelistic invention. Some excerpts:Peaks of mica kept watch over their long marches. How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanos gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.p. 14A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridge-top path, moving at a star's pace. The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and blood-lines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability, and the sketches they had made, in so far as they had any value, stood as records of this permeation. The infinite orography of the Cordillera was a laboratory of forms and colors.p. 16

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LibraryThing member DRFP

For better or for worse a more straightforward read than the other Aira novella I have read, The Literary Conference. Still... it just doesn't quite add up to much. The writing is quite nice, the ideas nice but at the end of the day it doesn't move me and it doesn't even really stir me to think

either. I can see the thoughts and themes but I'm not excited by them. Perhaps this is a work that would benefit from being much longer, where these ideas could play out properly and develop into something more meaningful.

As it is, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is just an interesting, minor curiosity. Sure, Aira is contemporary and that lends him an edge and a bit of kudos but I can't quite buy into the hype off of that alone.

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LibraryThing member MSarki

Three stars means "I liked it" so I guess that is good enough for me. Though my measly rating looks bad among all these five stars I see around me. The book was very easy to read and I liked some of the words the translator chose to use. More on this later. But I wasn't all that moved by the

monstrous other-worldly trip-off in the spirit-quest for art, or for its sake. I will expound later when I have had more time to run this reading through my mind's-eye filter. Or if the text somehow finds itself getting deliberately burrowed deeper below my skin.

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LibraryThing member snash

This was an easy enough read for a bizarre tale amid philosophical musings about reality and observation etc. Somehow, however, it never quite grabbed me. It seemed a bit cold and distant.

LibraryThing member ivan.frade

Novella about a travelling painter crossing from Chile to Argentina looking for the idealized "pampa". Condensed story that mixes some philosophical content with a dreamy description of the argentinian country side (those monumental carts!).

LibraryThing member bostonbibliophile

Another little treat from one of my favorite authors, this one about a pair of European painters traveling the wilds of Argentina. They wander; they paint; they muse. Then, they get stuck in a lightning storm and everything changes. Or does it? Aira's writing is typically meandering (like his

subjects) poetic and visually lush and descriptive. You feel like you are right in that melee with the painters. And then after. It's amazing.

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LibraryThing member m.belljackson

Episode offers compelling and beautifully poetic descriptive reading -

"In the glorious evening light of the 20th of January, they wondered at the assembly of silences and air."

with a plot turn not at all anticipated.

Not being a fan of horror or murder mysteries (Anne Hillerman and early Nevada

Barr are about as close as I can deal with and still sleep),
I was pleasantly enjoying Aira's landscape and painting descriptions and awaiting the promised pampas events.

After the astonishing and terrifying lightning, I did an online Search to be sure that this magical mystery was not true...and am still not certain what is...

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LibraryThing member drenglish

I can scarcely remember why I abandoned this. A book that continually talks about awe without ever once convincing me it knows what that is.

LibraryThing member dbsovereign

Riveting tale of an artist on a quest to find an indescribable something...Agonizingly brutal, a nightmare of excruciating pain ensues. This is an artist in search of the miraculous who finds himself a survivor that manages to hold onto his artistic talent despite the vicissitudes of fate. Minutely

told in a rather matter of fact way, this is a story filled with everyday wonder. Overall astounding. "He felt a vague, inexplicable nostalgia for what had not happened, and the lessons it might have taught him."

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LibraryThing member Ccyynn

Very powerful and eternally provocative. A book that has left me feeling as if I am looking at the world and nature and art with new and yet very ancient eyes. I think I have found another writer to love! Life is good.

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