Review by New York Times Review
THE Argentine novelist César Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature, a light-footed experimentalist who follows a credo of improvisation and constant forward motion, plotting as he goes and turning out at least two short novels a year. His agenda is subversive, but his brutal humor and off-kilter sense of beauty make his stories slip down like spiked cream puffs. The violent culinary imagery is apt: this is a writer who drowns characters in vats of strawberry ice cream (in the surreally autobiographical "How I Became a Nun"). As Roberto Bolaño, his contemporary, said, "Once you've read Aira, you want to keep reading Aira." "Ghosts," the latest installment in Aira's project, is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia. Set on the roof of a half-finished luxury apartment building in Buenos Aires, it takes place over the course of a single day. On a New Year's Eve morning of "high childishness," the future owners of the apartments visit the construction site, wandering from room to room. Most of the walls are up, but there are no doors or windows or flooring, and the raw strangeness of naked concrete is the first warning that the reader has entered Aira's makeshift universe. When the visitors reach the roof, they look up at the big satellite dish. Perched there, on the sharp edge, are three naked men. The visitors can't see them, but they are the ghosts of the novel's title. They and their many brethren are all alike: boisterous, sturdy apparitions covered in cement dust. As they float from floor to floor, they drift past the preparations for a party on the roof, where the night watchman Raúl Viñas lives in a few rooms with his family. The real protagonists of Aira's novel are collective (the apartment owners, the ghosts, the Viñas family), and any attempt to understand specific individuals as coherent characters is risky, since their thought processes are vaporous and mutable - but the oldest Viñas daughter, Patri, gradually drifts to the center of the story as night begins to fall. She, like her mother, can see the ghosts, but neither pays much attention to them, focusing instead on welcoming guests and preparing dinner. Eventually, though, Patri, overcome by a dreamy metaphysical malaise, wanders off and heeds the ghosts' siren call. Aira likes nothing better than to probe the obscure workings of the mind, but he also writes scenes of great prosaic beauty. The modest, lovely New Year's Eve party on the roof, complete with firecrackers and piles of fruit ("mosque-shaped apricots, bunches of green and black grapes, ... bleeding strawberries"), is a velvety backdrop for the novel's shocking final act. At one point earlier in the book, we learn that Patri could have earned a blue belt in karate but never took the exam, "for various reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection." That distaste is shared by Aira, and it is one of the keys to an appreciation of his novels. Any time an image, thought or scene is about to settle harmoniously, he jerks the floor out from underfoot. These exhilarating effects and the novel's aesthetic delights are captured with delicate precision by the translator Chris Andrews. Begin with this, or "How I Became a Nun," or the exquisite mini-maximalist epic "An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter" - the author himself would probably say that any one is as good as the next. Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed. Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Roberto Bolaño's "Savage Detectives" and "2666."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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, Ra l 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
