The blessed consummation of memory made real

The Divorce, by César Aira, is not about a divorce. This realization came as a minor disappointment, as a divorce story stumbled upon in a village bookshop during a weekend getaway while processing heartbreak felt serendipitously appropriate, to serve as potential inspiration for a writing project of my own.

In fact, the stories here revolve around Enrique, who owns the guest house in Buenos Aires where our divorcee, Kent, is staying.

The center, for me, was Enrique's guest house. It was the radiant source of a life composed of ever-new, constantly changing images. Because of my personal circumstances, principally the sense of impermanence that followed the divorce, I had gone in search of some kind of eternity. [...] Time seemed to rule everything. And yet it was not so. Time was merely the mask that eternity had put on to seduce the young.

Enrique is accidently doused in water and stopped in his tracks beside a sidewalk café, when Kent's companion recognizes him from a strange night at boarding school that marked the end of their childhood.

It had been a meeting and a parting in one, precipitated by an accident or an adventure that, over time, had grown in their memories, taking on cosmic proportions, like a galactic explosion.

The school was on fire, and the paths of these two lost souls converged in their desperation to escape amid hordes of Jesuits. The laws of physics went up in flames around them as they fled into an architectural model of the building, risking infinite recursion. But there they were, a chance meeting in a cafe, fifteen years later.

What they were experiencing in that moment was something like the blessed consummation of memory made real.

Enrique finally notices Kent, and then sees his mother at the next table. These encounters inspire further tales from Enrique's past. We learn about a sculptor apprenticed to another sculptor, neither of whom showed any proof of ever practicing the art.

It was interesting as a lesson: people can sincerely believe that they are something they are not, and even govern their lives according to that belief.

Part of the book circles around this theme of how force of personality overpowers depth of character or accomplishment,  and I wonder if that's meant to extend to a commentary on storytelling as a display of style over substance, or maybe it has something to do with divorce.

The mother's role in life was to head the family business, for which she consulted a manual, which may or may not have had a key, which each individual may or may not possess. Other aspects of her life had short shrift: 

Her sex life began late but was clamorous and chaotic, as if she were expressing herself in a foreign language.

[I love that line. Love is always a foreign language, vaguely familiar.]

Maybe divorce, by fixing one's status as individual, makes one perceive everything as being about oneself. We sees our own themes repeated in the people around us, entire societies reflecting our individual dynamics backs to us.

Finally we hear about Enrique's tragic love affair (not Kent's) with a supernatural woman imbued with Mystery, that ended right there in that moment on the sidewalk in a torrent of water. It is poetic, mythic, whimsical, sad, and just so.

Acquiring an education in love could happily occupy a whole life ("life" here being understood as a synonym for "youth"). The succession of lessons was endless. Everything was love, but love itself was synonymous with the anticipation of love. [...] The prospect of true love graced his encounters with emotion and poetry.

I'd been reluctant to hop on the Aira bandwagon — despite the acclaim for his novellas, no description grabbed me enough to pick one up. Maybe that changes now. A little bit Borges, a little bit Perec, not too mentally taxing, slightly awesome.