Yesterday I read How I Became A Nun written by Cesar Aira, the prolific writer from Argentina ( thirty plus books published). He is wildly alive and incredibly evocative with his language and follows his own logic in sequencing the story through periods of delirium and memory. Although at times the narrator presents the story in “facts”, as the novel progressed I began to doubt anything related by Cesar (name of both narrator and author), including his/her gender, his school behavior, and his friendships (” I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be best friends with [Arturito] the most popular boy in the school, but even this incredulity was duplicitous. For a start, I was careful to conceal it from Arturito”).
One thing for sure is that Aira is the master of the unexpected: I never knew where this novel was headed and the ending took me completely by surprise. Is “nun” a slang word for something else, something I don’t understand? Because I really did not understand when he/she actually became a nun. Martyr, maybe. Which brings me to Aira’s most inventive use of ice cream ever: as a tool of destruction, disillusionment, and initiation. No more sweet, innocent licks for me. Ice cream is a weapon, and Aira wields it with lethal precision.
The ice cream scene that begins the novel was perfectly written, holding me in thrall through each tension-filled moment of anticipation and then what I thought was the conclusion. In fact, I thought the whole scene was a metaphor for coming out of the closet. The father insists ice cream (women) are the best thing ever, no one can turn down a good ice cream, eating an ice cream (sex with a woman) is close to paradise; the son, however recoils in horror: “It’s awful! It’s sickening! It’s foul!“. The father is dumbfounded, upset, incredulous: “Everyone likes ice cream….Everyone except you, son, because you’re a moron.“ The son realizes his father will never understand why he hates ice cream so much: “it was pointless, because I couldn’t get it across; it was still there inside me, impossible to convey, even after I had spoken. For him, the ice cream was exquisite, because he liked it.”
Great metaphor for coming out of the closet, right? Wrong! Because what I thought was the conclusion of the scene was not the conclusion and the next twist in the novel turned the whole scene upside down. It was a brilliant move by Aira. No matter how surreal things become, no matter how unexpected an event is, Aira is the master because he makes it work: although what he creates is surreal, it is also — incredibly — believable.
My only complaint is that the novel, for all its brilliant maneuvering and posturing, did not illuminate. I appreciated the wild ride of this compelling read but the ending left me deflated flat-out, and in the dark as to what the heck the whole thing was about. I’m not looking for moral conclusions or neat endings but I want to be less in the dark at the end of a book than I was at the beginning. How I Became A Nun is Fantastical Noir, and I wanted just a little bit of light at the finish.
