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Authors: César Aira

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It didn’t take long for him to find out. In fact, in the
overdetermination of the present, waking up was accompanied by guffaws . . .
which was part of the nightmare, but on another level. Laughter was increasing
around him, reordering and giving substance to the space of the bedroom, and
from there to the house, the neighborhood, Buenos Aires, the world. He was the
last to sort himself out and to understand what was happening; he knew himself
and was resigned to such delays. In the meantime, the only thing he knew was
that from that moment on whatever happened in reality depended on the angle some
panel of the screen was hung, no matter how far-flung it was; for example, the
one that had excluded from this new Universe of reality a bonfire, or the flying
sparks of a bonfire, in the prehistory of the Maori people . . . Amid the
laughter, his eyes opened onto a New World, really truly new.

And in this new world, those present were laughing
heartily; the cameramen were turning off their cameras and lowering them,
revealing themselves as the two fake doctors from the ambulance on Bonifacio
Street; and the patient, choking on his laughter, was sitting up in bed and
pointing a finger at him, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard . . .
It was Actyn! That wretch . . . Everything had been staged by him! Or at least
that’s what he thought. The truth is that he wasn’t dying, he didn’t have cancer
nor had he ever, and he wasn’t a very wealthy businessman . . . The plausible
had completely changed. Laughter was justified; happiness needed no other
motive. After years of trying in vain, Actyn had managed to get Dr. Aira to
commit the biggest blunder of his career, the definitive one . . . And in
reality it was: the blunder as the transformation of the plausible, that is, as
a visible trace — the only one that could remain inscribed on memory — of the
transformation of one Universe into another, and hence of the secret power of
the Miracle Cure.

PRINGLES, 6 SEPTEMBER 1996

PRAISE FOR CÉSAR AIRA

“Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists
working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.”

–
The New York Times Book
Review

“Aira is a master at pivoting between the mundane and the
metaphysical.”

–
The Millions

“An improvisatory wildness that opens up possibilities where there
had seemed to be brick walls.”

–
The Paris Review

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A
LANDSCAPE PAINTER

“César Aira’s strange and arresting novel, in the tradition of
Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald . . . a memorable performance whose tone and
oddly compelling vision are distinctly Aira’s own.”

–
Los Angeles Times

“Aira’s most dazzling novel to be published in English thus
far.”

–
The New York Review of
Books

“Astonishing . . . a supercharged Céline, writing with a Star Wars
laser sword, turning Don Quixote into Picasso.”

–
Harpers

“Multifaceted and transporting . . . I get so absorbed that upon
finishing I don’t remember anything, like a complex cinematic dream that dissipates
upon awakening.”

– Patti Smith

GHOSTS

“An incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of
questioning, of anticipation.”

–
The Los Angeles Times

“Exhilarating. Cesar Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American
literature.
Ghosts
is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing
fantasia.”

–
The New York Times Book
Review

“Between hauntings,
Ghosts
is filled with Aira’s
beautifully precise observation of the texture of everyday life.”

–
The Millions

“Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and
quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.”

–
The New Yorker

HOW I BECAME A NUN

“Oblique and darkly humorous. Through the marginal, Aira
imaginatively explores the foibles of the human condition.”

–
The Harvard Review

“Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and
How I Became a
Nun
is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster.”

–
Time Out

“A foreboding fable of life and art.”

–
Publishers Weekly

THE LITERARY CONFERENCE

“Aira’s novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights
are brighter, the picture is sharper and everything happens at the speed of
thought.”

–
The Millions

“Disarming . . . amusing.”

–
The New Yorker

“César Aira’s tale of mad scientists, literary doubles and world
domination offers a gloriously absurdist example of the ‘constant flight forward’
that powers his inimitable fiction.”

–
The National

THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND

“Genius.”

–
Ploughshares

“A beautiful, strange fable . . . alternating between frivolity,
insight, and horror.”

–
Quarterly Conversation

VARAMO

“Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention,
invention as improvisation and improvisation as transgression, as
getting away
with something.
”

–
The New York Times Book
Review

“A lampoon of our need for narrative. No one these days does
metafiction like Aira.”

–
The Paris Review

Originally published by Ediciones Simurg, Buenos Aires, 1998;
published in conjunction with the literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a
newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may
be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (
nd
p1238
) in 2012

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada
Limited

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aira, César, 1949–

[Curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira. English]

Th
e Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira / by César Aira ;
translated by Katherine Silver.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8112-2000-2

I. Silver, Katherine. II. Title.