How I Became a Nun

How I Became a Nun is one of Cesar Aira's most inventive novels. Aira writes in simple prose, but lets his plot take strange and absurd turns, undermining what we would traditionally expect in a narrative. The book begins with a Proustian moment as six-year-old "Cesar Aira" is eating ice cream for the first time, but the story quickly shifts when the ice cream turns out to be poisoned, leading his father to a violent confrontation with the ice cream vendor, and later prison. There is nothing in the book about becoming a nun, it’s not clear if the narrator is even a boy or a girl (character descriptions refer to Cesar as both), and typical character actions are never straightforward (when Cesar visits his father in prison, he crawls through a hole in the wall). But it is a surreal delight.