Ghosts Quotes

“But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“The same thing happens in literature: in the composition of some works, the author becomes a whole society, by means of a kind of symbolic condensation, writing with the real or virtual collaboration of all the culture's specialists, while others works are made by an individual, working alone like the nomadic woman, in which case society is signified by the arrangement of the writer's books in relation to the books of others, their periodic appearance, and so on.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“Patri wondered if she wasn't herself (and this was the secret of all her thought) a woman in disguise, brilliantly disguised.. as a woman.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“Elisa [...] could perceive the subtlest shades of an intention. So she added a comment, to compensate for the unfortunate tone of her request - or, at least, to unhinge it and let it swing loose beyond, where the real words are, which have no meaning or force to compel.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“But in some ways parties were serious and important too, she thought. They were a way of suspending life, all the serious business of life, in order to do something unimportant: and wasn't that an important thing to do?”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“Since Patri was given to building castles in the air, certain chimerical spectacles could lead her to the utterly misguided belief that reality is everywhere.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“The centre of the village is a void elegantly furnished with a bloody suction.”
― César Aira, Ghosts

“[...]Imagine one of those people who don't think, a man whose only activity is reading novels, which for him is a purely pleasurable activity, and requires not the slightest intellectual effort; it's simply a matter of letting the pleasure of reading carry him along. Suddenly, some gesture or sentence, not to speak of a "thought", reveals that he is a philosopher in spite of himself. Where did he get that knowledge? From pleasure? From novels? Knowledge comes through the novels, of course, but not really from them. They are not the ground; you couldn't expect them to be. They're suspended in the void like everything else.”
― César Aira, Ghosts