Realism, Surrealism, and the perplexing oddities of Cesar Aira's fiction

Cesar Aira's "How I Became a Nun" is an intriguing and highly perplexing novella. It verges on greatness but doesn't quite make it over the top, for these reasons, I think: As I noted in a recent post on one of Aira's stories that appeared in The New Yorker (it was the first I'd heard of Aira), he has a very peculiar style: his story - and this novella as well - at first appears to be a very straightforward piece of realist or naturalistic writing, and then Aira slyly works into the narrative one or more totally bizarre observations, events, or images - and at first you think, well, that's odd, but maybe that's how things are done in Argentina, and it takes a while, as you proceed with the reading, to realize, wait a minute, he's created an entirely surreal world of fiction, every bit as strange as the weirdest of Kafka or Borges,m and maybe even more weird because of the creepy way he slips these elements into his fiction. In How I Became a Nun, for example, we begin with a straightforward account of how the narrator moved into a new city and her dad took her to have ice cream for the first time and, to her surprise and his annoyance, she hates the taste - and he forces her to try to eat her ice cream. In some ways, a typical set-up for a story about a young child and ongoing control struggles with father and adjustment to a new city, etc. - but, no, it turns out the ice cream has been poisoned (OK, we can accept that - and for the moment don't even question how odd that is) and then the dad gets into a fight with the vendor, kills him, goes to prison, the child is then hospitalized for a year (is that possible?) and in the hospital is visited by strange visions - possible, maybe, but things are getting weirder - and eventually you realize you're in a different world - not this one - though it looks a lot like this one. Aira could a great novelist, and I will no doubt read more of his works, but some of the elements in this novel are just oddities and perverse: why is his narrator sometimes and boy, sometimes a girl? why is does the title apparently bear no relation to the text? Why, at the end (spoiler, obviously) does the narrator actually die? If he could rein in the eccentricities just a little and make this work slightly more approachable, give it more of a structure, this would be an even stronger piece.