Flight Forward: On César Aira’s “Five”

César Aira has published over a hundred works, and this number alone tells you something about his method. He calls it la fuga hacia adelante, or “flight forward,” writing without revising, allowing each sentence to respond to the previous one rather than to any fixed plan. But the method raises a question that Aira has spent a lifetime exploring: what happens to a story when the author refuses to go back and fix it? Five, which collects five works translated by Chris Andrews and includes an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, pursues that question across its full range: what it can illuminate, what it risks, and where it finds a strange, genuine beauty.