If you have ever felt that literature ought to be flashier, more akin to its cousin, literary theory, then Cesar Aira is for you. Translated into English for the first time, this prolific Argentinian eccentric promises great pleasures to come, particularly for the athletic reader who feels unexercised by most new fiction.

“An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter” (New Directions, 120 pages, $12.95) takes Alexander von Humboldt as its presiding genius. Humboldt, besides coming up with the idea of the modern university, invented something called landscape physiognomy.The ideal Humboldtian naturalist, therefore, was not a botanist but a landscape painter, like Johann Moritz Rugendas, the hero of this novel.

Rugendas and his Pancho-like companion, also a painter, are touring Chile and Argentina, sketching out the “character” of the landscape, planning to publish a book of engravings upon their return to Europe.The book begins with their journey across the Andes: “The clouds came down so low they almost landed, but the slightest breeze would whisk them away … and produce others from bewildering corridors which seemed to give the sky ac cess to the center of the earth.” From the start, Mr. Aira’s visual imagination is straining at the reins, panting for spectacular effects.

When Rugendas and his partner set out towards the pampas, lightning strikes: “The sensation of having electrified blood was horrible but very brief.” Surviving the first lightning strike in good humor, Rugendas is almost destroyed by what follows:

The full battery of thunder exploded overhead. In a midnight darkness, broad and fine blazes interlocked. Balls of white fire the size of rooms rolled down the hillsides, the lightning bolts serving as cues in a game of meteoric billiards. The horse was turning … With each lightning strike the ground vibrated like a bell. The horse began to walk with supernatural prudence, lifting its hooves high, prancing slowly.

Rugendas, knocked from the saddle but caught in its stirrup, is dragged across the landscape, face-down. The language, magnificently translated by Chris Andrews, who has also translated Roberto Bolano, comes across so well because its power lies not in word order or other kinds of grace but in what the words describe. Mr. Aira oversteps the bounds of realism, forcing the world to live up to his imagination.

You can understand why Humboldt’s philosophy of landscape appeals to him: Both men, admittedly or not, want to project their minds onto the landscape. In Mr. Aira’s case, it is a jagged, changeable mind that finds its analogy in the zooming clouds of the Southern Cone.

The book’s titular “episode” is the disfigurement of Rugendas and its effect on his perception of the landscape. After the lightning strike, when he sat down in front of a vista, “he had to resist the temptation to sketch himself.” When he and his partner finally get to sketch an Indian attack, an opportunity they looked forward to long before the accident, Rugendas, now addicted to morphine, has to wrap a black mantilla over his face to block out the sunlight.

His thrilling meditations on art, the act of capturing a battle on paper, in real-time, in spite of and mediated by his physical limitations, entrap the reader in ecstatic, even tumescent attentiveness:

The skirmish had an infinite (and almost algebraic) plasticity, and since Rugendas was observing it at close range this time, his flying pencil traced details of tense and lax muscles, wet hair clinging to supremely expressive shoulders. … Everything sketched in this explosive present was material for future compositions, but although it was all provisional, a constraint came into play. It was as if each volume captured in two dimensions on the paper would have to be joined up with the others, in the calm of the studio, edge to edge, like a puzzle, without leaving any gaps.

This is the stuff of many yearning critical articles made vital, like spells on a battlefield.

***

Andrew Holleran’s novel “Grief” (Hyperion, 150 pages, $19.95) tiptoes around the White House, imagining a contemporary Washington, D.C., where the unnamed gay narrator has temporarily moved to mourn his deceased mother. “There’s something half-hearted about Washington,” Mr. Holleran writes,”as if the country cannot make up its mind about government itself.” Mr. Holleran sees a connection between the rootlessness of aging homosexuals and the emptiness of this “boardinghouse” of a city, a place more cosmopolitan than their repressive hometowns but still unavailable to them.

Haunted by the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who after her husband’s assassination was in exile, in her own way, from the national life, Mr. Holleran’s narrator offers a moving perspective on current affairs and an unusually convincing portrait of this vaguest of American cities. But the root of this eloquent – and somewhat sage – novel is more personal than political.

blytal@nysun.com