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César Aira

Ghosts Kindle Edition

by César Aira (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

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Ghosts is a remarkable short novel by cult Argentinean author Cesar Aira.

"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 turend up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course."

Ghosts revolves around an immigrant worker's family squatting on the haunted construction site on a luxury condominium building. All the workmen and their wives and children see the ghosts, who literally hang around the place, but one teenage girl becomes the most curious. Her questions about the ghosts get so intense that her mother -- in a chilling split-second -- realizes her daughter's life hangs in the balance.

Praise for Cesar Aira:

'Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop' Roberto Bolaño

'Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald' Los Angeles Times

Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. One of the most prolific writers in Argentina, Aira has published more than seventy books.

Length: 144 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Language: English

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About the Author

Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. One of the most prolific writers in Argentina, Aira has published more than seventy books. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN : B00DJ4Z324
Publisher : Penguin (1 August 2013)
Language : English
File size : 316 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 144 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 38,498 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 1,077 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 1,926 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 2,846 in Contemporary Fiction (Kindle Store)

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16 ratings

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anon

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 May 2017

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Simple, compelling, story that burns steadily to its conclusion.

GiovanniGF

Meh

Reviewed in the United States on 18 March 2018

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Very likely the glowing reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other places set my expectations too high. While not bad, Aira's Ghosts wasn't as experimental or as "chilling" (as the publisher called it) as they claimed; it was a mildly amusing novella with a not particularly surprising ending.

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.

One person found this helpful

Nate J

Light, Surreal and Delightful

Reviewed in the United States on 8 May 2014

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Ghosts is one of my favorite reads this year. It's light and easy to read, delightfully unsettling and strangely hopeful. Aira writes in Spanish, but this translation is excellent and you won't feel you're missing out by not reading in Spanish. I'm not going to give away the plot, but I will say it keeps you engaged right to the last page and it's all about two amazing parties and a girl who has to choose between them. Pair that with some magically aged wine, and what more could one ask for?

3 people found this helpful

Eric Treanor

An Allegory of Lost Innocence

Reviewed in the United States on 26 August 2010

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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.

7 people found this helpful

Jennifer J. Bain

More than a narrative

Reviewed in the United States on 20 August 2018

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I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s structure or open ended ideas set in a construction site is brilliant as you watch the deconstruction of time and place. Very paired down and well written.

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