Wie ich Nonne wurde

Von César Aira

Alles beginnt mit einem Erdbeereis, das so widerlich schmeckt, dass es dem kindlichen Erzähler buchstäblich im Halse stecken bleibt. Sein Vater bringt den Eismann kurzerhand um. Ein Mord, der eine Kette von Ereignissen in Gang bringt, die in ihrer schicksalhaften Unvermeidbarkeit eine groteske Tragik entwickeln. Die verstörende und unentwirrbare Ebenenverschiebung treibt die Erzählung in hoher Geschwindigkeit voran. Das Karussell kindlicher Boshaftigkeitenruft auf geniale Weise die wundersame Welt der Heranwachsenden und deren brutale Gewalt in Erinnerung. Nachdem der Vater durch eine bewusste Falschaussage des Erzählers statt zu 15 zu 25 Jahren Haft verurteilt wird, kommt es zu einer letzten Wendung, als die Ehefrau des Eismanns ihren Auftritt bekommt. Atemlos am Ende der Erzählung angelangt, beginnt die Suche nach einer Nonne. Finden wird sie nur, wer zwischen den Zeilen lesen kann.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 10. März 2015
• ISBN: 9783957571236

César Aira

César Aira, geboren 1949 in Coronel Pringles, veröffentlichte bisher über 80 Bücher: Romane, Novellen, Geschichten und Essays. Darüber hinaus übersetzt er aus dem Englischen, Französischen und Portugiesischen und lehrt an den Hochschulen von Rosario und Buenos Aires, wo er heute lebt. Aira gilt als einer der wichtigsten lateinamerikanischen Autoren der Gegenwart – und als ihr raffiniertester. Seine Texte überraschen durch Genresprünge, aberwitzige und riskante Erzählkonstruktionen und Plots. 2016 erhielt er den Premio Iberoamericano de Narrativa Manuel Rojas.

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Rezensionen für Wie ich Nonne wurde

[nosajeel · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

Great beginning, pretty good ending, much of the middle felt like muddle, but it was short enough that it wasn't a fatal detraction.

The narrator is a young boy or a young girl--the book keeps shifting as to which it is, with no logic that I could discern--who is born in the provinces around Buenos Aires in the 1930s. The book begins with his/her first taste of ice cream, which is tainted with food poisoning. A poignant scene of the father not understanding why he/she does not like the ice cream is followed by his losing his temper and murdering the ice cream seller. The next scene is the boy/girl recovering in the hospital and the father away in jail. It continues through the first years of school, narrated in a strange stream-of-consciousness way, and ends, as the back cover of the book nicely puts it, "in strawberry ice cream."

Based on this and Varamo, the other Cesar Aria book I read, he's a fascinating writer with a lot of upside, but not sure if I'm confident enough of anything else to take the (shallow) plunge again.

[thebookjunky · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

A boy no a girl no a boy child.
Written as if the grown up self is remembering the events of his life at age 6, and trying not to filter it through the lens of reality.
A child's reality is different. Dreams may be real. Reality may seem dream-like. Dreams and reality may be the same. The experience is the reality, whether it is felt in conventional consciousness or altered states.
Memories are distorted, incomplete and fleeting. They are warped by dreams, and dreams are warped by memories.
All culminating in a Grimm-like ending.

[johngrant1 · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

I came across an article somewhere that hotly recommended Aira's work &mdash; the most exciting Argentine novelist of our time, or words to that effect &mdash; so I thought I'd give him a try. Discovering that his novels are short &mdash; this one's barely more than a novella &mdash; encouraged my experimental zeal.

Despite the title, our narrator may be a boy rather than a girl: sometimes the text says one, sometimes the other. This is either annoying or amusing in a whimsical sort of a way, depending on the reader's mood/temperament; personally I rather enjoyed the uncertainty, as a sort of nose-thumbing at a very basic narrative convention. There's a far bigger nose-thumbing at narrative conventions later, but to find out what it is you'll have to either read the book or bribe me.

Whatever, the book starts with our hero(ine) being fed tainted ice cream by a negligent vendor; our hero(ine)'s father, irate, promptly smothers the vendor in his own poisoned confection. To say that the rest of the book is the tale of what happens to the child over the next few months/years as Dad's in prison would be technically accurate, but really the novel's overarching story isn't all that important &mdash; to the point that it's quite often lost sight of. Instead the main focus is on a succession of lesser stories, anecdote-style accounts of
some of the quirky events in the narrator's young life. And it's in these that Aira shows his real narrative power: I was both rapt and grinning a lot.

Overall, though, this is a fairly slight work. I enjoyed it, but I can't imagine I'll be making any concerted effort to hunt down other Aira novels . . . although if I see one on a shelf somewhere I might well pick it up.

[pieterpad_1 · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

An odd little novel. It's easier to say what this novel is not than to say what it is. Lay reviewers have complained at not knowing the sex of the first-person narrator; this seems pointless. The writing is compelling, straightahead, details returning in slightly shifted focus, characters clearly presented with intriguing surfaces if enigmatic depths. Not magic realism; not OuLiPo; not Surrealism. Fast; entertaining.

[jasonlf · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

Great beginning, pretty good ending, much of the middle felt like muddle, but it was short enough that it wasn't a fatal detraction.The narrator is a young boy or a young girl--the book keeps shifting as to which it is, with no logic that I could discern--who is born in the provinces around Buenos Aires in the 1930s. The book begins with his/her first taste of ice cream, which is tainted with food poisoning. A poignant scene of the father not understanding why he/she does not like the ice cream is followed by his losing his temper and murdering the ice cream seller. The next scene is the boy/girl recovering in the hospital and the father away in jail. It continues through the first years of school, narrated in a strange stream-of-consciousness way, and ends, as the back cover of the book nicely puts it, "in strawberry ice cream."Based on this and Varamo, the other Cesar Aria book I read, he's a fascinating writer with a lot of upside, but not sure if I'm confident enough of anything else to take the (shallow) plunge again.

[jorgearanda_1 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

A little novella with a captivating voice and a plot that is full of odd inconsistencies---its narrator (or reality, maybe) can't quite be trusted; it's always a bit off, not quite right, like a portrait that you're not sure but may have blinked just a moment ago.

[jimmychanga · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

"Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it"Certainly he is becoming one of my favorite writers. Certainly he writes two books which I have read thus far, both unlike each other and unlike anything else I've read, this one telling the story of a childhood, of a girl who is sometimes the author himself (a man), resembling a child's point of view that is obviously too grown up to be a true child's view. The author himself who is one of my favorites now because his writing tracks the dirt at the opening of 'reading' so that grooves have already formed where he plays with his little ideas. 'Plays' is the right word because he is a true tinkler, playing with philosophy rather than philosophizing, rather than explaining. What is remarkable is that his novels are not exercises in idea-making, there is no central idea either, it is a rather unfocused affair where each idea rises and falls and is soon forgotten; they are rather like a child's toys laid out on the floor so as to take up as much space. Things are askew just enough to be weird, but not weird enough to be unrealistic, so that you are constantly unsure: in fact Aira is one of the few who can write prose that is both absolutely crazy/wild/experimental and yet completely conforming to 'realism'. His characters are complex, not just a ghost summoned by ideas, but quirky untidy actual people, and his ideas are untidy too, and existing in a sort of believable reality. Also, Aira never falls into cliche. He fills his book with mysteries and inconsistencies, one here, a little thing off there, none of which are actual mistakes. Aira is truly one of the best writers today, and is criminally under-read.The beginning and end of the story are the worst parts. There he seems intent to make a "story" of it, whereas the middle of the story goes nowhere and is where the story flourishes with little details and thoughts inside the character's head which are the true pleasure of Aira. But even the beginning and end are captivating, in that he is being conventional and tidy and strange in this labored way that becomes almost ridiculous and unrealistic. "You have to watch out for vipers, tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse. Watch out for Aira! Don't go near him! Don't talk to him! Don't look at him! Pretend he doesn't exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno idea." p. 57

[tedmooney_1 · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

For "nun" substitute "writer." I have it on excellent authority. And this is an excellent book.PS: The ice cream cone that initiates the cascade of calamities that constitutes the plot-line is a reference to the opening sentence of Garcia Marquez's great "Cien Anos de Solidad" in which Colonel Aureliana Buendias remembers "that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (In "How I Became a Nun," it is the narrator's father who buys him/her a long-promised ice cream cone, thus setting off all the havoc the story details.) This is very much a post-"Boom" book. And proud of it.

[jimelkins · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

The first two chapters are absolutely excruciating to read: incredibly well managed, funny, weird, tense, well conceived, and utterly bizarre. The narrator is a boy, but then again, he might be a girl: that's strange enough, because the ambiguity is managed offhandedly -- someone refers to the protagonist as "he," and someone else as "she." (The offhandedness of references to gender outdoes Yann Martel's attempt at the same insouciance.) The child is offered a strawberry ice cream. It's a special treat, because he, or she, has never had ice cream. He, or she, nearly gags on it, and Aira's description is intense and nauseating. And then -- this is only a "spoiler" for chapter 2, not for the rest of the book (and the information is available in published reviews) -- the father flies into a rage and kills the ice-cream vendor. After that utterly unique start the book unravels, or rather, Aira relaxes into a sequence of set-pieces that could have been independent short stories. It's a Bildungsroman, and you follow the little girl, or boy, through various adventures to an ending that aspires to be as willfully strange as the opening. I'd argue that the problem here is the lingering pernicious influence of magic realism. This isn't magic realism, because nothing is supernatural, and it's programmatically unromantic and unsentimental. But it's determinedly quirky and persistently exaggeratedly eccentric, and those traits, I think, are leftovers -- echoes -- of the little frissons and surrealist pleasures of magic realism. Aira is a stupendously talented storyteller, and I intend to read everything of his that is translated. On this case, the form is episodic for no clear reason (why not a more linear narrative, when Aira shows he's a master of it in the first two chapters?), and the eccentricities are artificially concocted. (It's amazing that Bolaño liked him, because they are so different -- that makes me rethink Bolaño.) It will be interesting to see if his other books have different strengths, or if he is caught in a structureless collages of short-form set pieces.