Five

This marvelous collection from Argentinian surrealist Aira (Fulgentius) begins with a departure, in the form of a grounded and revelatory personal history. “Margarita (A Memory)” recounts the author’s childhood in rural Pringles, where most of his work is set, and his encounter with the bewitching Margarita, a distant relative whose “mythical and obscure” family history unlocked his ability to turn his dreams and fantasies into art (“I was discovering that it was possible to enter the picture and explore it from within, bathing in the rain of particles that fertilized the world”). The other four entries return to the bizarre terrain of Aira’s fiction. “The Dream” comprises two capers: a bank robbery committed by a teller and a search for a missing woman, the latter of which leads to a convent that houses a secretive cult of robotic nuns. “The Hormone Pill” begins comically, when a middle-aged husband takes one of his wife’s menopause pills as a prank. From there, the story zooms out to become a meditation on existence and the “joke-point at the center of the general system of life.” “Musical Brushstrokes” centers on a painter who flees Pringles only to find himself in a wilderness surrounded by feral hobos, a murderous dwarf, and the kind of revolutionary violence from which he’d hope to find sanctuary. The delightful picaresque “Princess Springtime” takes place on an island paradise where a princess in a tower translates hack novels until her idyll is shattered by the arrival of a fiendish pirate. Aira’s profound ability to capture the vividness and twisted logic of dreams remains undiminished. (May)