Ghosts

A história se passa em Buenos Aires no período da ditadura quando não se podia falar sobre a realidade política do país. A narrativa é praticamente toda sobre o que não se pode falar, o que não se pode contar. Um família de chilenos mora num prédio em final de construção, enquanto o pai trabalha na obra os filhos brincam pelo espaço inacabado do edifício que é também habitado por fantasmas. O narrador alterna a narrativa banal dessa família no último dia do ano, entrelaçada pelas visões de fantasmas que somente algumas pessoas vêem, com discussões filosóficas sobre vários temas. Poderia ser entendido como uma metáfora banal dos fantasmas dos desaparecido politícos, mas trata-se, a meu ver, de uma discussão show more muito mais ampla sobre a banalidade da vida e as grandes questões, ou a grande questão do sentido da vida. É escrito num estilo muito diferente do que eu estava acostumado a ler de literatura Argentina. Já estou com outro livro do César Aira na fila de leitura. show less

It's a hot New Year's Eve day, and the workers at the construction site of a new condominium in a large, unnamed Argentinian city are ready to call it a day in preparation for the festivities of the evening. For Raúl Viñas, the site's watchman, and his family, this means buying food and drinks for the feast, gathering up the children who love to wander around the empty floors of the building, and paying no heed to the ghosts. All the workers and the children have seen them, all males who lounge about naked in the huge satellite dish on the roof or glide between floors, but no one paid much attention to them.

Until young Patri, Raúl's teenage daughter from a previous marriage, notices the ghosts becoming more active than usual as the show more New Year approaches. She curiously follows them from floor to floor while her family sleeps, surprised that they actually speak to her, watch her as she asks why they are in such a hurry. They tell her of a grand feast planned for midnight and invite her to join them...on one condition.

Author César Aira uses that pivotal moment to examine Patri's place as a young woman of an age ready to flirt with boys and to find a husband but still young enough to be treated like a child. From my own interpretation of events in the book, Patri sees the ghosts as an ideal sort of man -- muscular, handsome -- and contrasts them to the men she knows in real life, who spend their off time being lazy or getting drunk. Does she see herself in the role of wife and mother? Does she want to see herself that way? That's the driving force behind the ghostly invitation to join their feast -- making Patri examine her life and her future. Also, the ghosts never come across as physically menacing, but that menace is there, subtly flowing through the atmosphere and adding tension until Patri ultimately makes her decision.

While the author does a fine job of painting the picture of the Viñas family and their life on the construction site, I struggled a bit with the section describing and analyzing architecture. Though it presents interesting information and ideas about architecture and its purpose, the section read too much like sitting through a college lecture and disrupted the flow of the story.

As a fan of tales involving ghosts and the supernatural, Aira's "Ghosts" provides a more mystical, more thought-provoking approach to them, and is an enjoyable read. show less

Stupendous, like everything of his I've read. As far as I can tell there are only five things in English: four novels, and a chapter chosen by Roberto Bolaño in an anthology. Aira has no competitors in contemporary Latin American fiction.

When have you ever read -- when will you ever read again -- a ghost story in which the ghosts don't really want anything, in which some people care and others don't, in which most ghosts are naked overweight men covered with white construction dust, in which the author keeps getting distracted by laundry, children playing, the construction of concrete apartment houses, the problems of shopping, the intrinsic interest of fruit, the philosophic correspondence of memory and time? No one thinks like Aira, show more and no one writes like him. I'm thinking I'll have to read everything that is translated, no matter how many books appear, no matter how popular he gets... show less

César Aira writes:

The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all – which technological advances have exacerbated if anything – isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser show more extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature. show less

Ghosts takes place over the course of a single day at the site of a half-finished apartment building in Buenos Aires. It is, in fact, the last day of the year, and the future owners of the incomplete condominiums have come by to meet with the developer, take stock of their future new homes and take measurements for their future new carpets and drapes. While the owners are meeting, the construction workers are winding up their half-day of work and looking forward to lunch and an extended siesta. On the top floor of the complex, the family of the night watchman stays out of the way of the hubbub in a temporary make-shift apartment they have occupied while construction continues. The children of the family play in the empty, wall-less show more rooms on the upper floors, racing their plastic toy cars and inventing elaborate games of hide and seek. Floating along between floors and ceilings, hovering like half-filled helium balloons, are the ghosts that haunt the building site. Although “haunt” doesn’t really describe it—“haunt” implies something menacing, scary. These ghosts (all men, all naked, all covered in the same cement dust that coats everything else at the building site) don’t seem to do much of anything except float and grumble to themselves. They are unseen by the developer and condo owners, and seen but ignored by the construction workers and the children—who seem to accept their presence in the same way that New Yorkers accept the existence of pigeons.

And that is the sum total of the book. A single ordinary day among very ordinary people. Even the ghosts are ordinary—so ordinary that we never wonder why they are there, or who they are, or why they are naked. Ghosts is the kind of story, one might say, where nothing really happens—if it weren’t for the fact that after a mere thirty pages you feel like everything is happening, all the time...full review here show less

At the last day of the year, in a unfinished apartment complex, the construction workers and the families that will live in the homes when they are finished are ready to wave goodbye to the old year. While the complex is being built, a Chilean family had moved in - the man serves as the night watchman and the family just tags along with him (and considering how many times it was mentioned that they were Chilean, I am pretty sure that I am missing something about Argentina and workers from Chile - a subtext that should be pretty clear to anyone from the area I suspect). And the new building is already overpopulated - with ghost - which only the Chilean family can see. That's the premise of the novel and Aira spent the first 100 pages show more staging the story - with the owners coming and going early in the day, the construction workers celebrating and going home and then the family and their relatives gathering to meet the new year. And somewhere in this buildup, the author links philosophy, language and architecture (and his very fast walk through the world architecture and its meaning is the most enjoyable part of the book - as short as it is).

The ghosts which usually are pretty silent decide that it is time to start being more active and to influence the humans and set about to do it by choosing the most vulnerable of them - the daughter of the mother of the family that had been born before the family was built, before she met her current husband. Aira style is poetic and flowery but even it does not save a pretty pointless story - at the end I was ready to say "So what?".

If the ghosts were not added, it would have been a pretty enjoyable story for a Chilean family in Argentina - still without a lot to say but "slice of life" is a valid genre and I sometimes enjoy it. With the ghosts? I am not sure what was all that about.

I suspect I simply did not understand the story. I enjoyed Aira's "The Literary Conference" (as weird as it was) so I might decide to give him another chance... but it won't be soon. show less

Very likely the glowing reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other places set my expectations too high. While not bad, Aira's Ghosts wasn't as experimental or as "chilling" (as the publisher called it) as they claimed; it was a mildly amusing novella with a not particularly surprising ending.

If you're in the market for a short novel that actually fulfills the claims made for this one, I recommend you try Maurice Blanchot's terrific Death Sentence. In fact, I think I'm going to re-read it now.