"The Literary Conference" by Cesar Aira (New Directions, 2010)

The book, less than 100 pages, was translated by Katherine Silver. The author's Argentinian. The narrator tells us that "In order to make myself understood, the following will need to be very clear and very detailed, even at the expense of literary elegance" (p.17), and that before he can relate his story he'll need to tell us other stories - fables, etc.

He tells a story about a Mad Scientist cloning people (actually Carlos Fuentes) to take over the world, then suggests how this parallels his situation as a writer. Vampirism too is only an analogy for writing, sucking up styles. He watches the performance of a play he wrote years before, trying to understand the symbolism.

The narrator (his name's César) pre-empts criticisms on p.58 -

• Once again I had submitted to nonsense, to the frivolity of invention for invention's sake, resorting to the unexpected as if it were some kind of deus ex machina!
• But my mania - to be constantly adding things, episodes, characters, paragraphs, to be constantly veering off course, branching out - is fatal. It must be due to insecurity

Luminous blue worms a 1000ft feet long descend from the mountains, like in a B-movie. The scientist thought he'd cloned Fuentes, but he'd only cloned his blue silk tie.

Too long-winded for me.

Other reviews

• Jane Housham (The Literary Conference is not about a literary conference (or only tangentially), but instead riffs on cloning, translation and genius before coming to a Technicolor SF climax. Aira writes at full tilt, going where the words take him (a style he calls “constant flight forward”) so that reading him is dizzying. Above all, he is concerned with the way art relates to reality and comes at this question from every angle, with the force of his fertile intellect and imagination.)
• Trevor Berrett (Aira’s matter-of-fact tone somehow manages to stay in tact in a book that begins as a puzzle-adventure in Venezuela, turns into a mad-scientist take-over-the-world science-fiction, and ends as a B-movie — and still manages to be about the creation of art.)