At the height of gratitude: César Aira and Alan Pauls as critics

Reading is the secret life, that is, real life. Two magnificent observers and practitioners of the tense osmosis between literature and life reopened the doors of their sanctum sanctorum , meticulous music boxes of their fervors. César Aira in Actos de presencia (Acts of Presence) and Alan Pauls in Alguien que canta en la habitación de al lado (Someone Sings in the Next Room ). The books are connected: Pauls includes an unmissable correspondence with Aira and a review of the latter.

If Aira didn't write about some of his favorites, it was by chance, or to protect them (from himself and others). At no point in these anthologies is the reader reminded of that kind of criticism that oscillates between the podium and the gallows. Neither hides behind obvious brilliance, and both offer a consolation of unprecedented power, as if another plane in literature—with less desire to be prominent and plunder—were still possible.

True to Aira's indomitable spirit, Actos de presencia owes more to random invitations. If Rubén Darío and Norah Lange appear, it doesn't mean they're part of his pantheon. The same goes for certain peculiar choices, such as the novel Amalia . Aira presents cases to explore how a novelist proceeds. He empties literature from within and takes the study of writing to another dimension, sustained by an almost scientific lyricism, allowing himself to be guided by the guideposts of enjambment and combinatorics. Punctuated by the occasional mathematical joke, such as the number of Amalias in Mármol's life and work.

These read speeches are derivatives, like his narratives, governed by a fanciful logic. Aira tests himself: how to delirious while making criticism. Although here they are more like essays, sometimes in the style of Charles Lamb or De Quincey; the essay in the form of a story that closes its circle as if by chance, with that ease. An essay is not about being right, but about distracting the spirit, returning some nuggets of gold, distributing them freely.

A great manufacturer of diffuse, highly suggestive effusions, Aira 's imprecision is at its peak. His associations may sound absurd, fallacious, but they are tremendously captivating. His is a charmingly despotic indolence: the false transparency of a line that never ceases to deceive in a fraudulent maneuver to which the reader, grateful for the shelter of a cobweb, blindly surrenders. Like the variations on various leitmotifs of his work: vocation; the disjunctions between perfection and imperfection ("If, deep down, imperfection is not a form of courtesy"), attention and distraction; the magnet of paradox and the refractions of realism; that which disappears or is subtracted; time, its speeds and its favors. No matter where Aira stands, the vision is always panoptic with respect to the arc of a life and a work.

In Someone Singing in the Next Room , with the impatience that comes with a surplus of affection, Alan Pauls defends an idea—a passion—of literature with exasperated precision. He paints an absolute vocation and disseminates feigned or aspirational self-portraits. He gracefully becomes a disciple, and is selfless without ceasing to be strict. There are many masters—Ludmer, Piglia, Saer—anomalous ones—Puig, Héctor Libertella, Copi, Masotta, Mansilla—and the French resistance: Barthes first and last, Deleuze, Roussel. "All of us who read like crazy come from the same place, the same situation, the same strange miracle: someone reads us ," he emphasizes.

He is fascinated and inspired by the misplaced, the unmarked, the amphibian. If he sometimes exaggerates his own discoveries, it is a result of generosity. This is perhaps Pauls 's most intimate and open book, and if at times he rises above the subject under discussion, it is not because he places himself there. On the contrary, he has patented a resource—laughing at himself with vanity—while his generous nerve proposes a banquet of italics. The fact is that the author of Temas lentos is worked by constant, intersecting forces, like a cum laude scholarship recipient of the Guattari School. As in Trance , he defines reading as an anachronistic practice with a language that aspires to be as contemporary as possible. His technique or tactic is to pull on a thread (and one thread at a time).

At times, yes, he is betrayed by that infestation of italics and Castilianized foreign terms. Or by the temptation to treat certain features as symptomatic, amidst a vocabulary that strives to impress itself. But in Pauls, vocabulary is style—equipped along the same lines as his graphic, high and low verbs—and two simple, valiantly frequent words are surprising: joy and happiness . As in Aira, astute drafts of theories abound, and a debut is offered: Pauls the poet (and the text emerges more than unscathed). At times, he will irritate, like any enlightened mind, but there is bad news for the suspicious and the detractors: Alan Pauls is an exceptional critic.

Acts of presence , César Aira. Random House Literature, 192 pages.

Someone Singing in the Next Room , by Alan Pauls. Random House Literature, 336 pages.