Reviews for How I Became a Nun

The average rating for How I Became a Nun based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-13 00:00:00 Wolfgang Lewioda I was the sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. Reality is the playground of the writer with memories and the artifacts of their past as the swings and slides for their games. César Aira's How I Became a Nun is a humorous jaunt through the life of a 6 year old boy'or girl'also named César Aira as s/he learns the magic of blending fact and fantasy to better understand the undercurrent of magic pulsing through plain reality. Through a lonely pilgrimage of childhood, César experiments with fiction in a preparation towards a life of being an author, a sacred undertaking of servitude to Stories much like entering the Sisterhood of Nuns. 'Fiction and reality were fused at this point; my simulation was becoming real, tinting all my lies with truth.' As in Elizabeth Hardwick's exquisite Sleepless Nights, Aira blends biography (though very limited) with fiction to create a lush tale where the lines between reality and fantasy are not only blurred but become irrelevant. The narrator of this story is César Aira, but not necessarily the César Aira writing the story, who is also not necessarily the same César Aira when he is not writing the story. They share the same hometown of Coronel Pringles, Argentina and enough subtle similarities to trick the reader into stepping dangerously toward an Intentional fallacy of assuming the author and narrator are one and the same, but this is all for sport and elevates the playfulness of his often meta-driven novels. César the narrator often identifies as a girl (though once as a boy in the opening chapter), despite all the outsider characters referring to César as a boy. This opens up an intrigue of gender identification, and it could be inferred that César experienced an emasculation of sorts after the tragedy of the opening scene with his father. However, such an interpretation seems too concrete for a book with such playful transparency. It does not matter which gender the narrator is, and the novel works equally well if César is a son or daughter; in the art of fiction an author must be able to identify as many characters, male or female, and must do so convincingly for the story to be accepted into the soul of the reader. César Aira presents both as a reminder that the author's own gender identification must be pushed aside to fully immerse into the realm of the character. 'The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.' César the narrator experiments with blending fact and fiction throughout the novel, preparing for a life as an author. An important lesson is learned early on when sitting on a ledge above a prison in which his father is interned. All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him...now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was. The author must watch their characters from an on-high vantage point, and truly love them all in order to understand them and make them work. Later, César spends hours in the bedroom imagining teaching a lesson to a classroom of student, students based on his/her own classmates. Students are imagined with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia. However, 'I hadn't invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren't destined to be cured but developed.' It is an act of creation, developing problems not to solve them but to bring them to fruition as a believable aspect of the fictitious classroom. Like a good author, César learns to create individuals that also must serve as a universal idea: 'they were nobody and they were everyone.' And through creating and teaching, César also learns and watches ideas form as if on their own power. Like an author, César guides a story while simultaneously being guided by it. How I Became a Nun is a wonderful little novel in which no Nuns are present. Instead, the nunhood is a vague metaphor for the calling of an author, in which they must devote their lives to the name of art. Like the 'voice of the radio within the radio', in which the fictitious voice of God delivers a moral message at the end of a religious radio program, the author must become the radio while also hearing 'the radio within the radio' that is the natural growth of the story being transmitted through them. This is a fantastically humorous and brief book that manages to breathlessly juggle a wide-reaching allegory, many aspects of which I have left untouched here. Literature is one of the closest things to magic we have in our world, the sort of magic that dazzles the heart and imagination of a young child, and Aira is a masterful purveyor into this magical world. 3.5/5 My vision couldn't be satisfied with what was visible, it had to go rushing on, beyond, into the abyss…

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-26 00:00:00 Michael Peterson We lost ourselves in a labyrinth that I can reconstruct step by step. 'How I became a Nun' introduces us to an exceptional and somewhat intimidating architect who generously makes use of imagination for constructing a unique narrative. Something keeps on happening here; if not in the form of reality then in the infinite space of fiction. Our belief or disbelief in the strange lives this book depicts is our own business only and whether we derive from it a healthy dose of entertainment or an inedible diet of perturbation hardly matters. What really matters is that nobody and nothing remains homeless in this world. That was the tragedy of my childhood and my whole life...My vision couldn't be satisfied with what was visible, it had to go rushing on, beyond, into the abyss, dragging me along behind... Here's another knock on the door of childhood with twists and turns galore. With W or the Memory of Childhood and The Notebook The Proof The Third Lie Three Novels, I already had my fair share of unexpected journeys into the erratic minds of children but guess every childhood is different irrespective of the happiness or unhappiness it experiences. The same holds true for this book also. This is the story of Argentina, relocation, parents, kids, ice-cream, hating the ice-cream, school, hating the teachers, deconstructing the reality and inventing a fiction which in turn befuddles the life of our protagonist, who is a 6 year old, César Aira. Although with that name enters the spirit of metafiction in this story but rest assured, whatever is in store for a reader is anything but clichéd tricks. This is my second Aira read after An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter where I did realize that he was an 'almost' great writer and wholeheartedly wanted to believe in Bolano's enthusiastic recommendation too but a small link between really liked it and it was amazing was missing for me. So I was vigilant with this book and kept looking for that 'almostness' but all I got was a unique blend of perfection and perfectly acceptable flaws chapter by chapter. There's only so much one can demand from a novella and Aira, with his compelling ingenuity and spirited writing has delivered a lot here. That space, that happiness had a color: rose-pink. The pink of the sky at sunset, a vast, transparent, faraway pink whose absurd apparition represented my life. I was vast, transparent and faraway, and my absurd life represented the sky. Living was painting: coloring myself with the pink of the inexplicably suspended light...