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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Proof

The Proof

Marcia is sixteen, overweight and unhappy. One day, as she’s walking down a Buenos Aires street, she hears a shout: ‘Wannafuck?’ Startled, she turns round and is confronted by two punk girls Lenin and Mao. Soon, she’s beguiled by them and the possibilities they open up. But the two have little time for a philosophical discussion of love: they need proof, and with their own savage logic the duo, calling themselves the Commando of Love, hold up a supermarket as the novel climaxes in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.

Author

César Aira

César Aira

Books

The Proof

The Lime Tree

César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own – so far. He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, ‘a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.’ By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but.

His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luis Borges’ literature of ideas. He has been called many things: ‘slippery’ (The Nation), ‘too smart’ (New York Sun), ‘infuriating’ (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of ‘perplexing episodes’ (New York Review of Books). He’s also been called ‘one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today’ (Roberto Bolaño).

Translator

Nick Caistor

Nick Caistor

Books

Blind Sunflowers

The Sorrows of Mexico

The Proof

Nick Caistor has translated more than thirty books by Spanish and Latin American authors. As Latin American editor of the magazine Index on Censorship, he edited the English version of Argentina’s report on the thousands of disappeared, NUNCA MAS, and has translated and written about many human rights problems in Latin America.

From Spain, he has translated novels by Juan Marse and Eduardo Mendoza which examine the effects of the Civil War; in 2007 he won the Valle-Inclan translation prize for his translation of The Sleeping Voice, a novel based on the experiences of Republican women prisoners in the Franco period.

Published by

And Other Stories, 2017
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Marcia is sixteen, overweight and unhappy. One day, as she’s walking down a Buenos Aires street, she hears a shout: ‘Wannafuck?’ Startled, she turns round and is confronted by two punk girls Lenin and Mao. Soon, she’s beguiled by them and the possibilities they open up. But the two have little time for a philosophical discussion of love: they need proof, and with their own savage logic the duo, calling themselves the Commando of Love, hold up a supermarket as the novel climaxes in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.

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