Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of his
hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator - who could well be the
author himself, although nothing is guaranteed in a book by Cesar Aira -
suddenly recalls the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his father
would take him to gather the lime-flower blossoms from which he made
tea. Beginning with his father, handsome and `black' and working-class,
and his strikingly grotesque mother, the narrator quickly leaps from
anecdote to anecdote, bringing to life his father's dream of upward
mobility, the dashing of their family's hopes when the Peronist party
fell from power, the single room they all shared, and his mother's
litany of political rants, which were used - like the lime-flower tea -
to keep his father calm. Aira's charming fictional memoir is a colourful
mosaic of a small-town neighbourhood, a playful portrait of the artist
as a child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's own
extraordinary imagination.
