"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun, ' began very
early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a
vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail.
Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of
the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the
intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So
starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel.
Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience
bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice
cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's
hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes
forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of
uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes
adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and
oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun
retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the
delirium of invention.
A few days after his
fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible
despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him
he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about
"something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him
to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic
sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life
and the importance of literature.