A review by anushree
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

adventurous challenging dark funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares what they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is that they are.

With precise and concise language, Aira's novella envisions a bizarre, sublime landscape that thwarts the staminas of the rugged colonial adventurer. Through Rugendas's physiognomic ruin, it posits that one cannot be a mere observer, a simple painter in search of harmonious and depopulated vistas devoid of any fraught histories. No, the land bites back in this story. There's also a tension running through the story: Rugendas claims that art is a tool that allows a kind of transcendence from the teleology of history, making history unnecessary in the understanding of the past. But as we approach the end of the narrative in all its psychotic, gruesome detail, we realize that the the artists bring with them everything they know into their paintings, making the histories they've heard about indigenous peoples inseparably intertwined with their own work. There are no first encounters, no blank slates here.