Ghosts

by César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219815
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/05/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

César Aira (b. 1949) was born in Coronel
Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. He has
published more than seventy books
of fiction and essays.

Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his New Directions translations of Roberto Bolaño.


A poet who
lives and teaches in Australia,
he has translated eight Bolaño
books and three novels by César
Aira for New Directions.

Editorial Reviews

Ghosts, the latest installment in Aira's project, is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia…Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.
—The New York Times

Natasha Wimmer

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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Publishers Weekly

"Utterly astonishing."

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

"Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop."

Roberto Bolaño

"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."

The Rumpus - Emily Keeler

"Wonderful... Ghosts is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation."

Los Angeles Times - Thomas McGonigle

"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