‘The Musical Brain,’ Stories by César Aira

A child races giddily from table to table in a crowded café, accepting objects fashioned by the patrons from paper napkins for her amusement. All are lovingly devised and impossibly elaborate: a plane, a bouquet of flowers, a diorama, a kangaroo with a movable tail, the Guggenheim ­Museum in Bilbao, a clown made of “paper so fragile a gaze could tear it.” As each fantasy falls apart in her eager little hands, it is discarded in favor of the next. The concentrated creative aura enveloping the patrons serves as a mere backdrop for her energetic engagement with the moment that keeps turning into the next moment.

This story, “In the Café,” appears early in the Argentine writer César Aira’s new collection, “The Musical Brain: And Other Stories,” and offers a playful example of Aira’s connection with how an innocent operates. He ventures into his chosen café and commits his observations to paper, then swiftly discards the handwritten page. He is at once the patron fabricating delicacies and the child moving back and forth in the stream of what he calls the perpetual present. “The immediate absorption of reality, which mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day,” Aira writes in the opening story, and it’s a skill he possesses himself. “I can go on inventing indefinitely,” he has said, embracing the incomprehensible with such compassionate delight that the incomprehensible begins to comprehend itself.

Aira’s cubist eye sees from every ­angle. Again and again in these stories he confronts the classic mathematical challenge known as the paper-­folding problem, which suggests a piece of ­paper can be folded in half only nine times. Not bound by the practical limits of this folding sequence, Aira envisions ­another algebraic possibility. In “Picasso,” an O. ­Henry-style tale, he not only paints a picture of who Picasso was and his place in art history, he also provides a majestically perceptive description of an imagined work of art: “The queen, composed of so many intersecting planes she seemed to have been extracted from a pack of cards folded a hundred times over, refuting the proven truth that nine is the maximum amount of times a piece of paper can be folded in half.”

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.

Aira has pursued this manipulation of the ordinary into the extraordinary through at least 80 small books, of which only a fraction have been translated. I came to him through Roberto Bolaño, one of his champions, and was quickly seduced by three novels in particular: “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter”; “Shantytown”; and “The Seamstress and the Wind,” which takes place in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, Aira’s hometown. It figures he’d come from a place called Pringles, where funny music resounds and nothing ever happens, except ­everything.

The opening line of this collection leads us unsuspectingly into Aira’s wondrously fractured world: “As a kid, in Pringles, I went to the movies a lot.” And so we enter a movie theater with multiple screens projecting other screens bending time, unraveling geometric memory and exposing the secret games of childhood.

No one pyramids hysteria like Aira, escalating the most banal event into a human stampede. In the title story, also set in Pringles, a casual stroll after a family dinner takes an unexpected turn into a bizarre parallel world. There is a Fellini-­esque circus; twin dwarves in matching black suits found murdered; an ancient librarian with a beehive and pink powdered face; an egg-laying, wing-sprouting, killer chrysalis. Not to mention the musical brain itself, which intermittently emits sound for an arbitrary few, like signals from a dying star.

In “God’s Tea Party,” a subatomic particle accidentally slips into a lavish birthday ritual presided over by frenetic apes. This unwittingly imbalances the universe, escalating the frenzied behavior of the apes and sending God himself into a momentary tizzy. The infinitesimal shift results in a new level of chaos, as if a child had altered a factor in the equation of a physicist. Here and everywhere, Aira is both the physicist and the child, the being that has the audacity to emerge and the power to dissipate.

Beauty and dark truth flow through his work. There are political stories here, as with the chilling “Acts of Charity,” which serves as a metaphor for wealthy religious institutions: Through time, a succession of priests use funds earmarked for the poor to build and maintain a so-called monument to charity and its luxuriant gardens, prioritizing aesthetic grandeur over the needs of the flock. And there are stories about the artistic process: The sadly eloquent “Cecil Taylor,” for instance, voices the persistent verismo of that great jazz innovator, juxtaposed with the sublimity of his failures as he attempted to communicate a language that had yet to be scored. Taylor, the hyper-harmonic pianist preoccupied in a way that Aira understands, sought to fold the keyboard more than nine times.

I once met Aira at a writer’s conference in Denmark. I was so excited at his presence that I bounded his way like a St. Bernard, but once I reached him all I could think to say — channeling my inner Chris Farley — was that he was awesome. Then I told him that “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter” was a masterpiece. He seemed startled, if not bemused, and insisted it was nothing more than a small history. We fell just short of a brutally passive argument, and then it started to rain. But trust me, “Landscape Painter” is a masterpiece. What does Aira know? He is only the writer.

I don’t normally read short stories. They often make me sad, as the characters come and go so quickly and we may never see them again. But Aira’s stories seem like shards from an ever expanding interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods. He executes digression with muscular lucidity. At times I had to simultaneously speed up and slow down to follow him, but once I matched his rhythm, his thoughts seemed no more than a stone skipping across the page, expressing something I had been privately thinking but could not put into words. In this he has the perfect translator in Chris Andrews, who leap by leap seamlessly mirrors Aira’s kaleidoscopic sensibilities, a symbiotic pairing.

César Aira once professed a fondness for the comic-strip character Little Lulu, which makes perfect sense to me. She was the Scheherazade of the funny pages, weaving tales for her little pals sitting in rapt attention at her feet. Hail César! I can only marvel at the amount of yarn he spins in order to tell tales of his own, from the political fable to the elaborately spun joke enriched with philosophy.