An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira is not about Alexander von Humboldt but Still Lovely

 

“The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition ‘I am a monster?’ It was easy enough to set it down on paper. But transmitting its significance was far more difficult” (46).

I think I’ve found a new favorite author.

César Aira’s novela An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter may only have 88 pages, but it manages to simultaneously map the human skull and the space between mountains. It’s a book about journeys, and it lives up to its themes on every page.

Its narrative follows 19th-century German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas as he travels across Argentina with his friend Robert Krause, painting the landscape and testing the aesthetic theories of his mentor, environmental scientist Alexander von Humboldt. When an unexpected encounter in the pampas transforms his body and mind, he sees his art in a new light. To reveal more would spoil the story’s curious, unfolding magic: Rugendas was a real person, but as far as I know, this episode in his life* is entirely fictional.

“How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanos gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; air-shafts voluminous as oceans” (14)

I first heard about this book after reading The Invention of Nature, a biography of Alexander von Humboldt that explored how his ideas shaped modern understanding of the environment as a unified being. At first, I didn’t question that a German visitor could be “the true discoverer of South America,” but after reading Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World I began to suspect that the scientist’s interpretation of the continent was deeply subjective. I don’t believe that Humboldt was an evil imperialist—he was a big inspiration for Simón Bolívar, among others—but I was excited to read a book about Humboldt’s legacy from a South American author. But Aira, who is Argintinean, doesn’t describe the scientist directly. Instead, he uses Rugendas’ life as a case study for Humboldt’s ideas.

The most beautiful and awkward part of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is its main character. Johann Moritz Rugendas is a gentle, passionate intellectual fuckup. Like Humboldt, he’s a European seeking to catalogue South America, and he supports a very Enlightenment-esque idea of universal aesthetic values while maintaining a privileged socioeconomic status. His musings about art, physiognomy and the society of the “Indians” on the Pampas provide some of the most profound passages in the story.

But he’s wrong. So often. And the narrator clings too close to him to contradict him outright.

It’s beautiful.

As a painter, Rugendas often struggles to convey the emotional immediacy of his surroundings on canvas, so it’s not out of the question—especially for a book by “one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today” according to Roberto Bolaño—for a similar barrier to exist between the author and his main character. I understand readers who see An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter as vaguely racist for his uninformed perspective on indigenous Argentinains, but I’m willing to give Aira the benefit of the doubt because he tells a smart, delicate and nuanced story.

The tone in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is intense and chilly, enveloping the reader like an ice bath. Reading Aira reminds me of reading Hermann Hesse or Natasha Threthewey, and like I do for those favorite writers, I want to read everything he wrote. That adds up to 20 or so works in English alone, which just means that I have a lot more to discover.

“He felt it would be like travelling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras, perhaps even before the inconceivable beginning of the universe (he was exaggerating), overtaking them all on their journey towards the truly unknown” (23)

 

*another interpretation of the title indicates that “the faithful Krause,” who also paints landscapes, is transformed by his friend’s experience.