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Ghosts (New Directions Paperbook Book 1133) Kindle Edition
The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels published 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication dateFebruary 24, 2009
- File size1944 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From The New Yorker
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Review
― San Francisco Chronicle
"A languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows... puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico."
― The New Yorker
"Wonderful... Ghosts is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation."
― Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times
"Aira's literary significance, like that of many other science fiction writers, comes from how he pushes us to question the porous line between fact and fantasy, to see it not only as malleable in history, but also blurred in the everyday. The engrossing power of his work, though, comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park."
― Los Angeles Review of Books
"Ghosts has some serious bite, for such a little book. Within it Aira likens literature to a building that has never been built, to an architect's dream. And though he never comes out and says it, I get the sense that for him the reader is always a ghost, haunting the unbuilt and the imagined, flying through time to attend to the party on the page."
― Emily Keeler, The Rumpus
"Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop."
― Roberto Bolano
Review
About the Author
The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.
Product details
- ASIN : B007CO9EN6
- Publisher : New Directions (February 24, 2009)
- Publication date : February 24, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1944 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 141 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,930 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #5,012 in Occult Horror
- #8,681 in Occult Fiction
- #28,066 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than eighty books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and now the United States.
One novel, La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 1996 he received a Guggenheim scholarship, in 2002 he was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
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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.
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.
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.