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The lime tree
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of his hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator - who could well be the author himself, although nothing is guaranteed in a book by Cesar Aira - suddenly recalls the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his father would take him to gather the lime-flower blossoms from which he made tea. Beginning with his father, handsome and `black' and working-class, and his strikingly grotesque mother, the narrator quickly leaps from anecdote to anecdote, bringing to life his father's dream of upward mobility, the dashing of their family's hopes when the Peronist party fell from power, the single room they all shared, and his mother's litany of political rants, which were used - like the lime-flower tea - to keep his father calm. Aira's charming fictional memoir is a colourful mosaic of a small-town neighbourhood, a playful portrait of the artist as a child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's own extraordinary imagination.
- About The Author
- César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own - so far. He declared that he might have become a painter if it weren't so difficult ("the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all"). He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, "a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels." By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but. His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luìs Borges' literature of ideas. He has been called many things: "slippery" (The Nation), "too smart" (New York Sun), "infuriating" (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of "perplexing episodes" (New York Review of Books). He's also been called "one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today" (Roberto Bolaño) and the "most original, shocking, exciting and subversive Spanish-language author of our day" (Ignacio Echevarrìa). Patti Smith was "quickly seduced" when she read The Seamstress and the Wind, and admits that seeing him at a writer's conference: "I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard".
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781911508120
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- And Other Stories, (02 November 2017)
- Number of Pages
- 112
- Weight
- 107 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 201 x 135 x 9 mm
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