A fiction that dismantles the bad habits of postmodernity.
Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is the ambition of any self-respecting writer. Especially when he risks the glory of being the first to receive it in his country. After appearing in the favorites lists for several years, it seems that César Aira's time has come to enjoy that moment and that condition.
This fiction narrates the vicissitudes of the writer's journey from Buenos Aires to Stockholm, his dreamy stay in the Nordic city and his return to an Argentina where he is not expected. In the end, the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature seems to have been awarded to the Eldense writer, with a Galician pedigree, Cesárea Areas.
Through an extensive play on words, this parody tries to dismantle the remnants of postmodernity still in force in the literary and academic worlds. The key is humor, which, in order to be so, cannot fail to be corrosive. Also tenderness, because beneath the greatest ambitions the most insignificant motivations are usually to be found.
It will please whoever manages to laugh, without guilt (or with it), at the most deeply rooted vices on the altars of culture and at the most recalcitrant social stereotypes. In short, whoever wants to take a walk through the nonsense, lift the cobblestones of postmodernity and peek at whatever may be underneath. A new normal?