Ema The Captive - Softcover

"What a gift: to look forward to reading a new Aira novel from New Directions every year for the rest of one's life."--Thomas McGonigle "Ema The Captive "

"Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas."--Mark Doty "Ema The Captive "

"A quixotic chemist."--Michael H. Miller "Ema The Captive "

"One of Argentina's leading contemporary writers."--William Skidelsky "Ema The Captive "

"His novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper, and everything happens at the speed of thought."--Jacob Mikanowski "Ema The Captive "

"Cesar Aira is Argentina's greatest living author."--Marcela Valdes "Ema The Captive "

"Aira oversteps the bounds of realism, forcing the world to live up to his imagination."--Benjamin Lytal "Ema The Captive "

"Exhilarating. Cesar Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed."--Natasha Wimmer "Ema The Captive "

"Aira's cubist eye sees from every angle. the stories in "the Musical Brain" exhibit the continuing narration of Aira's improvisational mind. his characters - whether comic-strip ruffians, apes, subatomic particles or a version of his boyhood self - enter a shifting and tilting landscape of events that unhinge our temporal existence and render it phantasmagorical yet seemingly everyday in the unfolding. His matter-of-fact approach, accepting even the most outlandish episodes, suspends disbelief and encourages one's own sense of displacement, of being released from the commonplace. Hail Cesar!"--Patti Smith "Ema The Captive "

"Aira delivers one surreal unraveling of reality after another that proceeds paradox by paradox into psychic realms."--Michael Upchurch "Ema The Captive "

In nineteenth-century Argentina, Ema, a delicate woman of indeterminate origins, is captured by soldiers and taken, along with with her newborn babe, to live as a concubine in a crude fort on the very edges of civilization. The trip is appalling (deprivations and rapes prevail along the way), yet the real story commences once Ema arrives at the fort, where she takes on a succession of lovers among the soldiers and Indians, leading to a brave and grand entrepreneurial experiment. As is usual with Aira’s work, the wonder of the book is in the details of customs, beauty, and language, and the curious, perplexing reality of human nature.