The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira · 2010

The Literary Conference is a comic science fiction novella that follows a struggling translator and author named César. After intuitively solving an ancient riddle on a Venezuelan beach and discovering pirate treasure, he becomes wealthy and pursues his primary ambition: world domination. He attends a literary conference to clone the renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, intending to use an army of clones to achieve his goal. The work is a metafictional, absurd, and digressive narrative that explores themes of creativity, language, and the nature of literature.