The Seamstress and the Wind
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
As he runs wildly amok, Aira captures childhood’s treasures — the reality of the fable and the delirium of invention — in this hilariously funny book.
The Seamstress and the Wind is a deliciously laugh-out-loud-funny novel. A seamstress who is sewing a wedding dress for the pregnant local art teacher fears that her son, while playing in a big semitruck, has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. Completely unhinged, she calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what’s happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race not only to the end of the world, but to adventures in desire — where the wild Southern wind falls in love with the seamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver. Interspersed are Aira’s musings about memory and childhood, and his hometown of Coronel Pringles, with a compelling view of the hard lot of this working-class town, situated not far from Buenos Aires.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This surrealist, self-indulgent exercise set between Patagonia and the Argentinian city of Coronel Pringles kicks off with an inspired invocation comparing the characteristics of memory and dreams, with Aira (Ghosts) casting his lot with the latter. Neither tale nor fable nor even novel-like in any traditional sense (be it stream-of-consciousness narrative, automatic writing, experimental fiction, or even magic realism), this reads like a dream interpretation exercise, replete with chatty snowmen, an all-powerful child monster, a "Paleomobile" and a romantically inclined wind going by the name Sir Ventarr n. While Aira manages to stir some sense of anticipation with the desperate quest of Delia Siffoni, a seamstress who has lost her child and seeks him out at "the end of the world," what actually happens to Delia (who is being hunted by an infant abomination spawned the previous night following a card game lost by her husband) or her missing son is never explicated, as Aira seems to lose interest, preferring to focus the d nouement on a game of cards between secondary characters, the point of which remains likewise elusive.
