THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND
by Cesar Aira
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My first Aira and most likely my last. The book's premise is certainly charming: a seamstress in a small town near Buenos Aires who is very good at what she does is making a wedding dress for a pregnant woman, but then suddenly her son goes missing. She suspects he might've been kidnapped by a local truck driver and taken off to Patagonia (he is in fact—completely unbeknownst to the driver—a stowaway). The seamstress gets a local taxi driver to help her follow suit, but not without taking the wedding dress along with her because she really needs to finish it. The pregnant bride-to-be hears about this and is worried she won't get her dress in time and follows suit too. So far so good, with echoes of IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD but maybe even better, but then it gets strange when midway through the journey the truck driver stops at a casino and things get weird. The entire plot is dropped, no longer does anyone have any purpose or motive. There's an auto-accident, the dress is swept away by strong winds along with the seamstress herself who engages in conversation with the wind, the pregnant woman is bet on at the casino, and the sleeping quarter within the truck leads to a vast underground world and at some point a car is repaired by replacing its wrecked body with the idle shell of a huge Paleozoic armadillo.
Listen, I like whimsy. In fact, I love whimsy. But I like my whimsy to add up. The Looney Tunes of old are full of whimsy, but it's whimsy that when strung together, delivers one coherent narrative. THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND starts off on solid ground and sort of promises something but ends up delivering nothing but completely detached scenes of whimsy that don't actually say or do anything. It is said that Aira is influenced by fairytales, but fairy tells are seldom incohesive and almost always have a pretty obvious point to make, or a few. It is why they are so enduring and successfully pass the test of time and space. Whatever it is I just read, it is certainly not that.