The Linden Tree

✍ Scribed by César Aira

• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 98 KB
• Edition: First American paperback edition
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0811227464

✦ Synopsis

A delightful fictional account of the small town Ce´sar Aira grew up in--not so long ago

The Linden Tree was written in 2003. In it the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living PBK in Buenos Aires) revisits down his childhood memories. Beginning with an enigmatically beautiful black father who gathered linden flowers to make a sleep-inducing tea, and continuing on to an irrational and physically deformed mother of European descent, the narrator also catalogs his best childhood friends and the many gossiping neighbors. Aira creates a colorful mosaic of an epoch in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Pero´n, aspired to a newfound middle class. Moving from anecdote to anecdote, alternating between the touching, amusing, and sometimes surreal, we are comforted by the fact that for Aira "everything is allegory."

This is a charming novella--evocative, reflexive,...