'Suddenly it hits you: you're not twenty; you're not young any more . .
. and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the
world has changed.'
Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without
fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that
reveals a gap in the author's knowledge of the world prompts him to sit
down in a café and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves
memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his
incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author's and the
reader's point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.