Ghosts (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

César Aira (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2009 | Series: New Directions Paperbook (Book 1133)

The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels published so far by New Directions.

“On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.”—from Ghosts

Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aira, an unusual Argentinean author (How I Became a Nun), writes a compelling novel about a migrant Chilean family living in an apartment house under construction in Buenos Aires. New Year's Eve finds the hard-drinking Chilean night watchman, Raúl Vinas, hosting a party with his wife, Elisa, their four small children and Elisa's pensive 15-year-old daughter, Patri. Moreover, ghosts reside in the house: naked, dust-covered floating men, mostly unseen except by Elisa and Patri. The novel engineers a clever layering of metaphorical details about the building, but gradually focuses on Elisa's preparations for the party and her conversations with her daughter about finding a real man to marry. Prodded perhaps by her isolation within the family, Patri accepts the ghosts' invitation to a midnight feast, at her life's peril. Aira takes off on fanciful sociological analogies that seem absurd in the mouths of these simple folk, so that in the end the novel functions as an allegorical, albeit touching, comment on his characters' materialism and class. (Feb.)
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From The New Yorker

Aira�s novella takes place in Buenos Aires on New Year�s Eve, inside a half-finished luxury-apartment complex. As the night watchman and his family, who occupy a makeshift dwelling on the roof, prepare for the evening�s festivities, a congregation of male ghosts flits about the building, sunning themselves in a �mood of summery exhibitionism.� Aira alternates between banal details of the family�s everyday existence and intellectual flights of fancy that include such diverse subjects as the social structure of Pygmy communities and Aborigine myth. As night falls, the watchman�s ineffectual, fiercely imaginative teen-age stepdaughter is drawn into a deadly pact with the ghosts as a way to escape an unnamed �specific torment.� Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780811217422
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217422
• ASIN: 0811217426
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Allegory of Lost Innocence August 25, 2010

By Eric Treanor

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

All fiction is allegorical--which might explain why I don't read much fiction anymore. One tires, after a certain age, of lessons.

Most contemporary novelists try to disguise their allegories in the centuries-old conventions of realism. They pretend to be wholly--not selectively--reporting the world. But César Aira can't be bothered. So my principle reaction to Ghosts was relief: at least this guy isn't pretending. He's an unapologetic child of Kafka--or, more to the point, he shows us that we all are, fancy literary embellishments aside.

But I didn't only feel relief; I also felt like I'd been returned to fiction as it sounded when I was a child. We're trained early to look for the lessons--the moral--in stories. The history of my life as a reader can be summarized as a slow transition from explicit to implicit allegory. And now back. In this case, it's a happy return.

Aira's topics in Ghosts (which are really one topic) are the birth of desire, the end of innocence, the death in life that goes by the name eros. The book evokes that death with levity and precision. Like Kafka, Aria is never clever. He is compassionate, lucid, and funny. A girl in her mid-teens lives among ghosts, all of them men, naked phantasms covered in dust. She's lived among them for months, seen them floating about--but one day she actually sees them. And that's the difference, right? To really see a body. That's the moment when everything changes. This little book evokes that moment--when, to put it conventionally, a girl becomes a woman--exquisitely.

I read the book at a leisurely pace, in part because I was re-learning how to read like a kid. Sometimes I felt a kind of aching impatience to know what was going to happen, what the lesson would be.... It might take me a while to once again experience that impatient ache as pleasure.

But among the book's many indisputable pleasures: a fantastic essay, dead in the middle of the book, on architecture; and the cast of characters, a family of immigrant Chileans living in Buenos Aires. Wonderful: people I love, a city I love, both evoked with generosity and intelligence.

Chris Andrews' translation is, as always, superb. Heartily recommended. Read more ›

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The In-Between February 24, 2010

By Bryan Byrd

Format:Paperback

César Aira's 'Ghosts' is a book that, by design or no, is constructed from elements that reflect the in-between moments; the middle stages that make up the difference between departing and arriving, beginning and completion, life and death. It describes the afternoon and evening of the last day of the year, culminating at midnight - a moment that is part of neither the old or the new. Primarily, it follows the Viñas family - Chilean, but who are living in Argentina - temporarily living on top of a partially constructed building for which the father acts as the night watchman. Of this family, it is Patri, the oldest daughter, on whom the focus comes to rest. As the stepdaughter of the watchman - part of the family, yet also apart - and a teenager - neither child nor adult - Patri glides through the day until she receives a one time opportunity to attend a party like none other.

During it all, ghosts - neither a part of this world nor the next - drift in and out of the family's daily routine. I had not read any books prior to this one that adhered to the conventions of Magical Realism in literature (and as far as I'm able to determine, Aira does this quite competently), and honestly, I haven't yet formed an opinion about the technique. I do think it's a very peculiar way of telling a story, but one that, in certain instances, may allow the author the flexibility to express his ideas that typical methods might prevent. If I'd been looking for an example of this literary style, I probably would have started somewhere else, with one of its accepted classics, but I wasn't really aware that this was the medium in which Aira was working.... For those who are already familiar with Magical Realism, you may wish to let your feelings about this manner of writing be your guide with 'Ghosts', as it seems fully entrenched in it.

Ultimately, I found Aira's work interesting but also frustrating. If his goal was to paint an image in my mind of the shape and texture of being 'in-between', then I think he succeeded, but if he was attempting something more than this limited objective, then I have to honestly admit that I was baffled. One section specifically, beginning with the description of Patri's dream and discussing the concept of the 'un-built' in architecture and literature, frankly had me holding on by my mental fingernails. Since the majority of the rest of the book is straightforward and focused on the daily routine of this family, I felt as though this expository section held all the necessary clues to Aira's thrust - and since I never made a solid connection, I feel as though I lost any deeper meanings the book contained.

I usually assign the blame to myself when I have this kind of difficulty, as long as the writer has proved his ability in other areas, which I think Aira does. And it's quite possible that there are some concepts that just do not translate well, despite the competence of the translator. In the end, César Aira is an author whose work I'll probably revisit - both to reread 'Ghosts', and, eventually, by picking up An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (New Directions Paperbook) - and try to reestablish that connection after my initial response has worn away.

Lastly, although I know that cover blurbs are only a marketing device designed to sell books, I do get fed up with their misrepresentations, and try to point them out when I see them. In this case, a quote from Mark Doty on the back cover claims that "Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald". I don't know exactly what the context is for 'in the tradition of', but the implication is that if you like one, then you'll like the other. From the little I know about Borges, that half of the claim may be apt, but I find almost nothing similar between 'Ghost' and in the work I've read of Sebald. My snap impression is that the author of the quote randomly selected a name (Sebald) that is known but not yet widely read (popularly obscure?) - either to impress with his ranging knowledge, or to steer readers of one author to another at the request of the publishers. Perhaps I'm being unfair - but hearing the justification for such a comparison would be fascinating. Read more ›

4.0 out of 5 stars Aira is wonderous as always May 30, 2012

By jafrank

Format:Paperback

Aira's ability to sketch out the entire domestic life of a bunch of migrant workers living in an unfinished apartment complex as a masterful act of compression. He moves with charm, wit and deprecation between these people, balancing between the typical idyls of family life, grocery shopping, marriages, celebrations, children playing games, and balances it out with his usual wondrous, metaphysical musings on literally anything and everything: architecture, space, anthropology, rejection, death to name a few. The dark undertones in his other work feel a bit more pronounced here. This is a book about poor people living and working in someone else's country. They are ghosts of an altogether different, but no less real nature than the titular ghosts who float between the floors

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A disagreeable book that made no sense to me August 22, 2012

By Linda Linguvic HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This 1990 Argentinian book was the choice of my International reading group at my local bookstore. I read the whole book but wasn't able to make the discussion. This is a short book, merely 139 pages long and frankly, I suffered through all of them. The book is set in Argentina and tells the story of a Chilean immigrant family who are living in the top floor of a partly constructed luxury apartment house. Their teenage daughter meets some ghosts that are living in the building and the result is tragedy

The book is well written and is an international sensation but frankly, I hated every word of it and would never have finished it if I thought I would be absent from the discussion. Sometimes these discussions give me an appreciation of the book but because I wasn't able to attend that evening I am left with only the memory of slogging through a disagreeable book that didn't make much sense to me.