Fulgentius

✍ Scribed by César Aira

• Book ID: 112175901
• Publisher: New Directions
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 132 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780811231701

✦ Synopsis

Aira holds a fun-house mirror up to the genre of historical fiction in this novel about an aging Roman general on what may be his last campaign into the provinces.

By profession I am a soldier, a general in the glorious Roman army. As a playwright, I think of myself as a sublime amateur.

In Cesar Aira's new novel, Fulgentius, a sixty-seven-year-old imperial Roman general--"Rome's most illustrious and experienced"--is sent to pacify the remote province of Pannonia.He is a thoughtful, introspective person, a saturnine intellectual who greatly enjoys being on the march away from his loving family, and the sometimes deadly intrigues of Rome. Fulgentius is also a playwright (though of exactly one play) and in every city he pacifies, he stages a grand production of his farcical tragedy (written at the tender age of twelve) about a man who becomes a famous general only to be murdered "at the hands of shadowy foreigners." Curiously, what he had...