The Seamstress and the Wind

Originally published in Spanish in 1994, and now brought out in English by New Directions, Argentine writer César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind weaves together two distinct narrative threads to great effect. In one strand, the narrator struggles to write a story after he comes up with the title "The Seamstress and the Wind." The other strand concerns the same narrator's memory of a childhood friend who went missing, and how the friend's mother, the "seamstress," lost her sanity and embarked on a desperate journey to find her son. Aira is at his best when he combines magical realism, elements of the fantastic, and meta-fictional ponderings to dramatize the mother's and other characters' intense emotional reactions to the absence of the child. The narrator frequently interrupts the story along the way, but instead of using the common meta-fictional ploy of addressing the reader directly, he uses his characters as launching points to philosophize on the nature of storytelling in the face of both remembering and forgetting his friend's mysterious disappearance. In the end, it's Aira's decision to focus on the process of imagining his story that makes The Seamstress and the Wind more compelling than a conventionally woven tale.