Out of the Cage by Fernanda García Lao

Abstract

0 school; a boy entertains the childlike avatar of Krishna before his parents abandon him to an apprenticeship with an abusive quasisculptor who lives in squalor; a woman leads numerous, disparate lives marked by violence, Christmas trees, and a mysterious manual; and a man has a love affair with a beautiful and unattainable woman who is as ephemeral as a noontime shadow. These short, interrupting stories furnish the characters with histories that reflect the Argentine culture and climate of 2008. In this way, The Divorce is a cautionary palimpsest of Aira’s Argentine contemporaneity—it is an overwriting of reality with fiction, with memory, and with fantasy. Aira laments Argentina’s thencomplacency with its newfound prosperity, and The Divorce figures and refigures the consequences of Time and the pursuit of eternity. The narrator muses that “because of the sense of impermanence that followed the divorce, I had gone in search of some kind of eternity.” It is this duality— the impermanent and the eternal—that is imbued into the lives of the characters and onto the pages of the novel. Ultimately, The Divorce is a masterful demonstration of focused imagination. Aira chronicles overlapping coincidences, layering memory with temporality and injecting magic into the mundane to create a kaleidoscopic tale of serendipitous meetings that rumbles like an avalanche down a mountain, gathering speed and power as the novel progresses. With lightness and verve, Aira twirls the macro with the micro to create a singular novel whose story turns and turns again until it comes full circle, like “that ‘little steel fairy,’ the bicycle, from whose spinning stories are born.” Alex Crayon University of Oklahoma Fernanda García Lao Out of the Cage Trans. Will Vanderhyden. Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 168 pages. . IT IS ALWAYS cause for excitement and anticipation when a foreign writer is translated , into any language, but especially into English, where the number of translated books is woefully low. Those emotions are heightened when the translator is one whose work you admire. This is the case with Argentine author Fernanda García Lao’s Out of the Cage, translated by Will Vanderhyden. Writing in the newspaper Página/12, Silvina Friera called García Lao “Argentine literature’s strangest writer,” adding, “No one narrates the absurd like her. There’d never been, there is no one now, and there will never be anyone like her.” As you will see, this is in no way an exaggeration. The novel begins: “The day of my death everyone was there. Winter had paused and spun on itself like a tornado. It was a national holiday, I don’t remember which one, but we were exultant. [. . .] Somehow, an LP, careening through the air like a demented boomerang, had severed my jugular. And I didn’t understand who or what had thrown it. Maybe the bloody poetics of the line had become embodied in my throat. [. . .] My death was so unexpected and exquisite that, for a moment, nobody noticed it. Not even me.” What follows is a bizarre family saga, narrated in first person by the disembodied (corporeal representation is central to the novel) Aurora Berro (more about her name later). García Lao’s prose is unpresuming; one might even say boring. The sentences are repetitively linear: often containing little more than a subject and predicate. There is no excess. The novel’s excess lies elsewhere: in its absurd, at times contrived, conceits (a protagonist-narrator named Aurora who is killed by a flying LP while her family sings a hymn to the Argentine flag, which, not coincidentally, is known as “Aurora”); grotesque characters that border on the ridiculous (a bicephalic child named Manfredo); and absurdist plot lines (a husband who engineers a sex robot to look like Lana Turner). On the surface, Out of the Cage (in the same interview with Página/12, the author declares that “it’s necessary to free oneself from physical and mental cages,” hence the novel’s title) is the story of a family and a menagerie of sideshowesque characters ; it can also be read as an allegory of mid-twentieth-century Argentine political history, revolving around three key years, which also provide the novel’s...