Of course, this is an Aira novel, and readers familiar with Aira’s trademark style will expect that these philosophical questions will share space with a dizzying array of incongruous narrative materials: an evil mastermind’s plot to take over the world surgical operations that harvest brain waves from their patients lush descriptions of the Nile River that read like pastiches of nineteenth-century travelogues mundane accounts of the narrator’s problems with his computer and absurdist digressions about how airport controls damage the international art scene by preventing artists from smuggling much-needed drugs onto planes. Ovando’s demonstration of his powers, and his insistence that Aira’s narrator can only possess them if he gives up reading and writing, spurs the narrator and his friends, over the length of Aira’s short novel, to elaborate reflections on the relationship between fiction and reality: Isn’t Literature itself an act of transformation? How are the inventions of fiction any different from the miraculous transubstantiation of sugar into gold? And when these feats are later narrated to others, as Aira’s alter ego repeatedly does throughout the novel (including to his reader), is there any real way to distinguish between the creative power of writing and Ovanda’s promised magic? This is the question that is posed to the novel’s narrator, a writer “past sixty, enjoying a certain renown” who resembles a fictionalized version of Aira, by Ovando, “a down and out” bookseller “with intellectual pretensions.” And just in case Aira’s narrator thinks this is a hypothetical question, Ovando concludes his offer with a concrete demonstration of his powers: the transformation of a cube of sugar into solid gold. The Argentine writer César Aira’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Famous Magician, begins with a Faustian proposal: Given the chance, would you trade your ability to read for complete mastery over matter? For the ability to make the laws of physics do your bidding and bend them to your will?

The narrator by michael cisco