An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter: César Aira (Penguin Archive) - Softcover

Aira, César

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241746884 ISBN 13: 9780241746882

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2025

Synopsis

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals… But then something goes appallingly wrong.

This is one of Aira’s great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.

About this title

About the Author

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. Over his long and remarkable career Aira has made his own fictional form, creating highly compressed short narratives which in other hands would contain enough material for sprawling epics. His novels available in English include Dinner, The Literary Conference, The Seamstress and the Wind, Ghosts and The Lime Tree. Aira lives in Buenos Aires.

From the Back Cover

In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; ‘that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck’.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241746884
• ISBN 13: 9780241746882
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112