NovelWorld

Cesar Aira’s HOW I BECAME A NUN ($13.95) is a weird, tiny novel from Argentina, only 117 short pages. Evidently Aira has written dozens of these mini-books, and is super popular in his home country. I’ll say one thing: this cute little book (the cover shows a child with a giant strawberry ice cream cone) has the most intense, mind-blowing opening of any novel I’ve read in years. A triple surprise in the first thirty pages. Pure narrative whiplash, and all using the simple device of a strawberry ice cream cone. Really, the sequence is brilliant.

Unfortunately, from there the story doesn’t know where to go. It wanders through hallucinations, tries this, tries that, and then Aira brings the whole thing to an abrupt halt with a cartoonish murder ending, in which the narrator is killed.

Unique, yes. Satisfying, no. One of the book’s trippy aspects is that the narrator refers to herself as a six-year-old girl, while everyone around her acts like he’s a boy and addresses him as little Master Cesar. This is never resolved.

Same goes for the title. No one ever becomes a nun. It has nothing to do with anything. In the end, this little novel suffers from the same problem. It’s a clever doodle going nowhere. But I’ll never, ever, ever forget those first thirty pages.