The Linden Tree

The Linden Tree is César Aira’s effort at his own, to steal from Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Mixing metaphor, dreams and impressions Aira means to depict the difficulties of being a writer—and how his particular artistic vision came to be—as reflected in his childhood.Beginning with the Linden Tree of the title, a plant that contains a soporific inducing drug, and continuing with his slightly mad father’s saying that a key difference for the artist is that people live life forward while writers compose with the end in view, Aira blends different Proustean-like reflections to serve as an Ariadne’s thread to the understanding of how his literary oeuvre came to be.I wouldn’t recommend this book to those who haven’t read at least some of Aira’s other works as so much of it is devoted to explaining his particular literary genesis. But the memories are gorgeously written, even in translation, and those those who are not conversant with Aira will still find the book a pleasure.Readable in one sitting but with enough depth to captivate a reader or book club for many weeks, we should all be glad this novella is finally available in a competent English translation. Hopefully, this will result in Aira being more read North of the equator.

The Linden Tree is set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in South America, from 1949 under the Peronist Regime, to about 1959. The narrator is nearing seventy, and writes about his childhood as a ten year old boy. He begins with a description of the unique Monster Lime Tree—a linden tree—in the plaza of his home city, Coronel Pringles in Flores, now a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. His father, an electrician, gathered its flowers to make tea to cure his chronic insomnia.His father is black and his mother is white European with a physical deformity and thick-lens glasses: “the differences must have been noticeable.” This differences, the narrator says, were “intensified by the enigma” of his father’s beauty and the shortness of his mother. But ‘he’d had the courage to marry—for love.”The narrator writes of social change. “The problem for my father was that after 1955 the march of History began, and he was left behind”—it was the end of Juan Peron’s presidency. Part of this social change in his childhood was his “morbid fascination with madness, particularly the madness that is latent in normality, one step away from the most secure and comforting daily routine, as opposed to the sort that is confined to mental asylums.”This fascination resulted from his frequent visits to the accountant’s office opposite his house, where he would hear “crazy monologues” about “the accelerating pace of change.” The family’s dreams of rising from poverty to middle class were shattered.This is a novella—short and delightful.

I've read 12 of Aira's books and all of them are fascinating and brilliant - you can start with any one of his books- need more of his work, as only about 15 out of 80 of his books are translated into english ...