Photograph by Nina Subin.

César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” 

About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him:

The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with … In my house there is always something more important to do than write.

They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life.

And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages.

And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.

Margarita: A Memory is the perfect opener to the Aira experience, a rich coming-of-age story viewed through the eyes of a character who is himself just getting his sea legs, so to speak. Aira has said that all his characters are versions of himself, and in this case that self is a young Argentine man about to embark on a new life in the late fifties. 

The narrator has bouts of anxiety about moving to the big city for college. “The habit of reading had led me to believe that I could handle whatever might happen and work out what to do,” he says. “But the truth was that nothing had happened to me yet.” Something, then, must happen: an ultraintense love, during a hot, sticky summer, for a young woman named Margarita. The writing is hyperbolically passionate—appropriate to his hypersensitivity—but that passion extends to Aira’s embrace of the real depths in the youth’s soul as well as to the author’s deep awareness of the beauty of nature. (Aira is a close and loving observer of all creatures, and especially, in Margarita, of insects: “From time to time a praying mantis would fall into our hands: long, green, elegant, and lavishly jointed.”)

The narrator of Margarita is an ordinary person, and yet the story of his summer romance has a vast, epic quality. Time comes several times to sudden stops, punctuating a seemingly endless series of miraculous emotional transformations, as the real and the unreal blend together around this young man who, surrounded by a large cast of characters in a vibrant world, ironically thinks of himself as a loner. As so many Aira stories do, Margarita lingers on the mundane—and very relatable—elements of its narrator’s life, even as it celebrates the surreal way that the mental throes of passion can render the everyday unrecognizable even while at the same time both beautiful and heartbreaking. Aira delights in holding up an individual consciousness to the light, to admire its facets in all their strange variety: he has clearly looked very intently at his fellow beings. “Reality,” he has said, “is what provides me with everything I need to write. It is inexhaustible, and all I have to do is let it come, like the fairy with the magic wand that fulfills all wishes, at least all writers’ wishes. It is always different, varied, deliriously changing. I owe it the best things I’ve ever written, and I’ve learned to wait for its help when I don’t know how to go on. I only invent in extreme cases where reality does not manifest itself. But they are rare, exceptional cases. The great Dadaist Goddess Reality is generous, she has too much to give to be stingy. My job is basically to make the transitions between her gifts. It is because of my devotion to Reality that I hate Realism, that inhuman corset that turns off all the lights of the marvelous.”

While Aira is very different from his countryman Jorge Luis Borges, his work does share an enthusiasm for compressing and expanding space and time. Aira, however, puts these devices in a subjective frame, and though his narrative worlds can be as heady and complex as the Library of Babel, they are often centered on down-to-earth characters. In some respects, his work resembles J. G. Ballard’s, and that of other writers who use landscape and memory to shift between the microscopic and the macroscopic, with the world forever pulsing between these extremes. Tales like “The Hormone Pill,” a very short story, and the longer novella The Dream flee forward from Margarita, using tiny moments to build epics which go careening off into worlds beyond our understanding.

The Dream in particular—with its restless seeking across a single morning at a newsstand—seems to find cosmic, universal struggles in what we tend to think of as unremarkable and inconsequential (the things we do, and the thoughts we think as we go about our days). This wonderful tale has both a telescopic and kaleidoscopic effect and what seems at first like a side plot involving a nearby convent, an unwed mother, and white-collar crime, soon becomes central to a narrative web so bizarre it could only have been produced by Aira’s particular process. And yet, at the same time, the placid normalcy of a Buenos Aires day remains serene: “They went to the door. One step, and they were out in the yard. Everything changed. The trees resumed their whispering and the morning light continued to fall on a candid, peaceful world.” Liminal is an overused word in regard to fiction, but there is a liminal aspect to Aira’s work; he has braided his truly liberated imagination and his remarkable gift for observation into personal experiences.

But again, these gifts operate for Aira within his liberating flight forward: “The initial push comes from an idea that comes to me from who knows where, ‘out of the blue sky’ [in English] or from something I hear. But I never plan the entire narration, short story, or novella. I just take that beginning and I jump into it blindly. And then, yes, the episodes that follow usually come from things that happen to me, things I see, I hear. I like it to be like that because if I planned the entire story there would be a straight line from the beginning to the end. But if I leave it open to serendipity and randomness, that line becomes sinuous and, at least for me, more entertaining.” (However, budding writers might note that he’s also stated that “with time I’ve realized that inspiration is secondary, but what is primary is your will. Your desire to do what you do. If you lose that will, inspiration is good for nothing.”)

The ever-in-flight, ever-entertaining Aira is also a noted satirist and humorist. The final two tales in this volume, Musical Brushstrokes and Princess Springtime, pivot to showcase just how whimsical and playful Aria can be, even as his work grapples with the great themes—Love, Death, the Mysteries of Existence. In Musical Brushstrokes, a solitary artist’s project of painting a mural allows a mind-bending perspective that, widening, builds on the approach in The Dream; Princess Springtime—a madcap, whimsical, many-leveled comment on translation, literature, and publishing—unfolds its metaconstruction like a piece of impossible origami, and what unfolds is immensely satisfying. In both novellas, philosophical concepts are conveyed in ways that never feel imposed or didactic: it’s as if Aira, with a wave of his hand, transforms a ponderous whale into a whale-shaped school of lithe tiny fish. Aira worked for many years as a translator of all kinds of works into Spanish—the truly eclectic list of his translations is long, including Muriel Spark, Edgar Allan Poe, Dino Buzzati, Arthur Conan Doyle, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ray Bradbury, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, and Diane Ackerman. And, unsurprisingly, his satire of the economics of the Latin American publishing industry, from the perspective of a fairy-tale princess who also happens to be a freelance pulp-fiction translator, is delightfully sharp.

In all these stories, Aira somehow manages to elevate his characters without resorting to techniques that typically go by the name of characterization. As he writes in The Dream: “The most ordinary and inoffensive people still had a margin of unpredictability, even danger.” There are no soft edges to his characters, nothing juvenile or jejune, but along with the sharpness, a warmth and inquisitiveness animates the narratives in this volume, and makes them feel akin to the best works of such acclaimed writers as Steven Millhauser, Kevin Brockmeier, and André Alexis.

Aira is a benevolent writer, even if, as we know from some of his novels, he is also adept at chronicling cruelty and brutality. Our lives, he seems to say, are not something we impose upon the world, nor are they imposed upon us—in fact, we are simply inextricable from the world around us. Embedding and implicating his characters in the landscape, he lends deep interiority not only to the people who populate his stories, but to their settings as well.

No wonder that Aira enjoys a certain literary celebrity status in Argentina, where he is often stopped in the street. He claims the public recognition is more due to his magazine and newspaper appearances than to readerly engagement with his novels and stories, but we disagree. Such a prodigiously inventive imagination, producing such immersive fiction, is a gift to readers like no other, an inexhaustible feast of delight, and it’s no wonder his fans can’t resist the opportunity to thank him in person.

Adapted from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s introduction to Five by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, which will be published by New Directions on July 28.

Ann VanderMeer is a writer and editor whose work has won a Hugo Award and a World Fantasy Award.