Description

In Korea, a little Buddhist monk (really very dwarf-sized) dreams of the Western world and secretly reads up on Western culture. When he meets the holidaying French couple Napoleon Chirac and Jacqueline Bloodymary he offers his services as their guide, in the hope they will take him, a penniless monk, to Europe. He whisks them off on a tour of the temples. Among the many twists and turns, our stunned tourists encounter a suicidal horse and discover that a person can also be a robot. Though our monk appears to them as the very spirit of tourism, nothing is natural in this tour de force of Aira’s twisted imagination.

Publisher Review

‘Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.’ Roberto Bolano ——— ‘Hail Cesar!’ Patti Smith ——— ‘Aira writes at full tilt, going where the words take him (a style he calls “constant flight forward”) so that reading him is dizzying.’ Jane Housham, The Guardian ———- ‘Bewitching and bewildering … Compulsively readable … Aira’s writing – with its equal measures of rich complications and airy whimsies – combines brevity with so many possible meanings, or none.’ Arifa Akbar, Financial Times ——— ‘Surreal and intriguing … a drama is as fun as it is mystifying.’ The Guardian ——— ‘A work of literary trigonometry. The prose bounds along with a gleeful spring in its step, dragging the improbable story behind it … If you’re happy to have your buttons pushed, then you’ll fall for this shaggy-dog-story-on-shrooms, and fall hard.’ Roger Cox, The Scotsman ——— ‘Funny, poetic and wonderfully readable … Idiosyncratic and vivacious, The Seamstress and the Wind reads more like an afternoon in the pub with a dreamy Eddie Izzard than a sit-down session exploring prose form with Eimear McBride, and is all the better for it.’ Big Issue ——— ‘Sophisticated and energetic writing which will leave you scratching your head with curious wonder … I admire the sheer uncompromising audacity and verve of this novel.’ The Lonesome Reader ———- ‘Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald.’ Mark Doty, Los Angeles Times ———- ‘It works as a piece of art whose fresh, gorgeous images carry rich meanings about the nature of transformation. But it also works as a story that makes you miss your subway stop.’ Electric Literature