The Hare by César Aira

Is it particularly difficult to write about César Aira, or am I just out of practice?

Either way, I’ve been having an exceptionally hard time composing a post on The Hare. But it’s August 31, officially the last day of a Spanish(-Language) Literature Month that was graciously extended by a whole second month, and I need to do it.

My last post on Aira, on his miracle cures, was not so positive. But The Hare is magnificent. Its plot is superficially similar to that of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter: a Romantically educated European goes to South America and wants to see Indians. In this case, the main character is Clarke, a naturalist and geographer, and instead of painting the Indians, he wants to talk to them.

Specifically, he wants to talk to them about the Legibrerian Hare, a leporid that’s very shy, but when it does come out, it can fly. The reality of the Legibrerian Hare—and pretty much everything else in the Huilliche world—is hazy. The picaresque journey Clarke will go on in search of the hare, or the other things he’s seeking, will teach him the ultimate lesson of life for the Huilliche and Voroga, the two warring tribes whose story he’s invaded:

Clarke had never perceived so clearly the need for the novelesque in life: it was the only truly useful thing, precisely because it lent weight to the uselessness of everything.

Clarke’s whole life is later determined to be the “kind of thing [that] only happens in novels…but then, novels only happen in reality.”

There’s a lot of good absurdist stuff in here for me, but also a lot of good normal stuff. Clarke makes a young friend and they talk and have adventures. He experiences growth by confiding in others and exploring the world. People fall in love and find their lost loves and find their lost relations—you know, just like happens in any good novel.

Early in the novel, one of the Indians tells an anecdote about their leader. He ends it with a joke: “And also, to be truly spontaneous, one would have to say ‘spontaniety,’ wouldn’t one?” The narrator notes carefully:

The joke was different in Huilliche, of course, which was the language they were speaking in. But it survives the translation.

Does it? One can only wonder. After all, “[b]ooks should never be adapted. As a reader, you start thinking of all the changes they must have made, and you don’t enjoy the book.” And not only is most of the book not actually written in Huilliche, even though pretty much all the dialogue is spoken in Huilliche, but I also of course read an English translation from the Spanish. What was I saying, again? Something about the absurdity in trying to understand what anyone is really saying?

After all, The Hare is a novel, and novels are a pack of lies.