What if Aira won the Nobel Prize?

When they ask César Aira if winning the Nobel prize would end with his reputation as a cult writer he replies that the 900,000 euros would be a good consolation. Recognize, yes, a qualm: As soon as you know something, you start to spend it imaginaryly; In the end, if you don't win, you feel the poorest man in the universe. It happened, he says, when his name appeared two years ago on the list of the international Booker that ended cattle László Krasznahorkai. It now appears in the betting house Ladbrokes, the favorite toy of the Letraheridos until tomorrow is announced in Stockholm the writer-or singer-who will follow Bob Dylan in the Palmares. Aira appears next to, between seventy more, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Ko One and Amos Oz, but it takes advantage: the writer who spends imaginary the silver of the prizes has already won imaginaryly the most coveted of the world letters. In the novel The Chair of the Eagle Carlos Fuentes endorsed his colleague the famous medal to follow a game: The Argentine had made them clone the Mexican in the Congress of Literature. The clone, however, looks like him. "In Argentina there are more airianos than writers," said Monday Ariana Harwicz in the bookstore of Madrid infamous types during a colloquium organized on the occasion of Liber, the International Book Fair that each year is held alternatively in Madrid and Barcelona – Let the example take place-and today it starts with the homeland of Borges as a guest country. The author of Fictions, who died without a Nobel, was precisely the most repeated name in the debate on Monday. Both Harwicz and the rest of the participants – Marcelo Carnero, Diego Sasturain and Damián Tabarovsky – invoked him as the most important author of the twentieth Century in the Spanish language, which would solfa the peripheral character of the rioplatense literature. Peripherals or Centrals? It was the question that launched the discussion and they all agreed that it can be central and at the same time eccentric, ie without having written that masterpiece that everyone associates with a name and that, it would be more, it is usually a novel as God commands. It is not the case of pagans like Aira or Borges. As you know in Scandinavia, the second didn't even culture the genre. As they know their multiple editors, at the rate of book by season, the first one does not stop to cultivate it. Or to manipulate it genetically. If they had not already won the discoverers of the "internal clock" of the body-a whole field for novelists-, they could have given to doctor Aira the Nobel medicine.