This short work by prolific author Aira, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews, is almost exactly what I was expecting--a brief interlude written by a man musing on his perception of reality while an important birthday passes.

He begins with an embarrassing anecdote about how he never really learned the science behind the phases of the moon. Recently he made a joke about the earth creating a shadow across the moon. His wife corrected him. It was then he realized that his entire life he’d been wrong about something he just assumed he knew, a fact of reality he had never questioned before and one which was never contradicted throughout his youth. He tries to backtrack, to discover when he first assumed a shadow created the moon’s phases. It brings him back to his youth in Colonel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province, where he sits in a cafe and writes this volume.

I enjoyed the meandering prose, but only because Aira’s writing is so sincere. As slim as the volume is, there’s weight to his words. There’s a passage that will stay with me: “I subscribe to the unoriginal theory that what makes a person unique and different from everyone else is a sum of particular experiences accumulated over the course of an existence...Reading a book, of course, is an experience too, and the sum of books that a person has read makes him or her unique as a reader.”

So the books we read comprise our unique fingerprint, and we only have so many minutes, hours, days to read what we can in one lifetime. The reminder of that had me spiraling a bit. I’m 30--so for the last 20 or so years, what I’ve read on the shelves of the personal library of my mind has made me who I am. And what I choose to read from this point forward with the measly time I have left will compose the rest of me. The pressure is real.

Pick up this book if you’re interested in having a conversation with a very interesting human about what it means to be of a certain age during this certain time in history. Reflection on mortality can come with a smile.

In Birthday, Aira continues his grand literary project of writing about his writing. It's a wonderful series of vignettes as Aira looks back on his career at the age of fifty and ruminates on just what it is he's been up to publishing his little novels.

I've read all of his work that's been translated into English so far, and this is one of my favorites.

An author of some stature, renown for writing dozens of short novellas in a contemporary style, is turning fifty. Although his birthday passes largely without notice, he nevertheless stops to take stock of what exactly that milestone means. However, rather than look backward to reflect on his myriad accomplishments and disappointments, he instead looks forward to ruminate on where the rest of his life and career might be headed. After all, this approach is consistent with the “flight-forward” method he has popularized in his fiction, whereby he refrains from using today’s writing time to revise yesterday’s work, but rather improvises his way around any narrative problems he has created for himself.

Birthday is the result of that self-reflection. Falling somewhere between a memoir and a philosophical treatise, the book consists of ten brief essays in which Aira expounds on a series of topics that appear to have been on his mind at the time. He begins with a story about his misunderstanding of how phases of the moon happen and uses that as a metaphor for everything else in his life that he has not figured out. In subsequent essays, he offers his observations on many other topics, such as the possibility of an after-life, various processes and styles for creating fiction, the literary challenges of predicting the future, what makes each reader unique, the difficulty of translating work from other cultures, the omnibus “Encyclopedia” project he has yet to begin, and how the production of literature and mathematics differ.

To be sure, some of these musings were interesting and thought-provoking. More often, though, the work came off as a hurriedly constructed series of random thoughts that were, at best, loosely connected to one another and very specific to the author’s personal experiences. However, the real problem I had was trying to answer the question: Why exactly am I reading this book? I suspect that if I was more familiar with Aira’s fictional catalog, these essays might have given me some great insights into his writing method and his message. Unfortunately, that was not the case and so anything that was special about this collection was mostly lost on me. I am afraid that might also be true for any other potential reader who is not already a fan of the author.