
The Little Buddhist Monk
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.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- Read more about César Aira on our author page.
- Read a new interview with Aira in The Skinny
- You can watch a great interview with César Aira on the website of the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen here.
Reviews
The Spectator
‘Beautiful . . . so dismayingly sad, and so ghastly, yet so satirically piercing, that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’
The Skinny
‘An absurdist interpretation of the Western gaze onto Eastern exoticism.’