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3.51 AVERAGE
3.51 AVERAGE
I like the way he builds characters--including the absurd normality of the ghosts. Reminds me a bit of Gabriel García Márquez. On a more personal note, living in Colombia has allowed me to equally enjoy the banter about Chilenos and Argentinos. And something about being seduced by the eternal.
dark
funny
sad
tense
slow-paced
Quite beautiful descriptions of the mundane and everyday, but his spurts of philosophizing are pretentious and often just wrong. The ending was a disappointing shock and awe end.
I thought this was a fine book, honestly I think the quicker I read it the more I got out of it. The final twenty pages were particularly pleasing to read, interesting. I understand the moves made and the story and meta-commentary being told, and think that if this were in any longer of a work I would not have finished it. But nonetheless, it made me laugh in parts and ponder in others.
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.
This snippet should give you a pretty good idea of what you're getting yourself into with Ghosts: both thematically and stylistically.
Aira has created a whirlwind tour of ghosts living on the edges of society. Mostly the ghosts take the figurative form of a family; caretakers living at the top of a luxury condominium under construction. But some of the ghosts are literal: Argentinian spectres covered in dust, floating around the site, naked and provocative.
The book is omniscient, gliding through the neighborhood and swooping down on choice moments. The first part of the book thus seems to consist of little vignettes, a teenage boy buying lunch for the construction workers at the convenience store, the buyers with their train of interior designers and landscapers crafting their unbuilt condo, the mother on the hot roof trying to get her toddlers to eat something.
At some point the focus hones in on the family as they come together to celebrate the new year.
This isn't a book with a plot. It is a book of ideas and liminal spaces. There is a section in the middle, that marks the transition from a high-level sweep to the focus on the family, where Aira spends pages thinking about community and self and what is built vs unbuilt and how the two can come together to create realities (which is what the quote above is drawn from).
Some of this, of course, is to do with the literal (building a condo/decorating the unformed apartment within) but much is allegorical. For example, forming the sense of oneself as a young adult:
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.
Or understanding the reality of picking a mate vs the archetype of that process.
The writing is sometimes overwrought, and because I read this in English I can't tell if this is because of the translation or in spite of it.
Because of that this is the sort of book that you start reading and instantly what to start over with. It is full of small truths and your tolerance for them may vary depending on how well they resonate with you.
Here are some of the ones that stuck with me.
On politely recovering from a badly-placed sigh during a conversation:
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.
On leisure:
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?
On drinking your own koolaid:
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.
On cohabitation:
The centre of the village is a void elegantly furnished with a bloody suction.
I'll end on another meta quote, which about sums up the experience of reading this book:
[...]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 reallt from they. They are not the ground; you couldn't expect them to be. They're suspended in the void like everything else.
Highly recommended for a day of introspection and Latin American magic. 4.5/5
Moments of beauty and dreamlike eccentricity aside, I found this Argentinian novella a disappointment. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a satire, or a ghost story, or a family drama and I understand that the book was dealing with boundaries and barriers and nebulously porous, indeterminate landscapes but it felt just a little too intangible for me. The intellectual tangents were unwelcome (I’m clearly just not clever enough) and though the prose was remarkably propulsive, the dense paragraphs and sentences became a little cumbersome.
However, the amount of ghostly genitalia on show was highly impressive! That’s my main takeaway I think...
However, the amount of ghostly genitalia on show was highly impressive! That’s my main takeaway I think...
I always like to start at the beginning, but here, if anything, the beginning is deliberately deceptive. That might be the point. Or it might not be. We're talking about architecture, absurdity, the ephemeral, the movement of thought, surrealism, space-time, reality, and of course literature itself (there's a lot going on in this small book). So how does the book announce itself?
"On the morning of the 31st of December, the Pagaldays went to see the apartment they'd bought at the construction site on Calle José Bonifacio 2161 with Bartolo Sacristán Olmedo, the gardener they'd hired to decorate their two large front and back balconies with plants." [my translation from the Italian]
The Pagaldays are a red-herring, as they have nothing to do with the story (except I suppose in their capacity as well-to-do Argentinians). Strange for them to be the first thing mentioned. The date is highlighted because the story takes place on that one day, and it's not just any day, but the last day of the year. The fact that they are visiting a not-yet-constructed (and not-yet-decorated) house is the clue. How does one go from the non-built (thought) to the built (reality)?
The first several pages are cinematic in that we are presented with various characters [1] in and around the not-yet-done apartment building in an unbroken montage (in fact the whole book has no breaks, unless you count paragraphs). But like a spinning wheel, the book finally stops on the family of Raúl Viñas and Elisa Vicuñas, Chileans living in a temporary apartment on the top floor while the building is under construction. Here's our real story. (One gets the impression there's a bit of Chile vs Argentina going on here, but without any background knowledge, there's not much I can say about that.)
Oh, and did I mention the ghosts? They can be seen floating in and around the building, all well-built men, cavorting and laughing and smiling mysteriously, bending their bodies in all manner of ways (Gombrowiczian immaturity?), even impersonating clocks. Everyone sees them, and they're just "normal" (Raúl goes so far as to store his wine in them...)
The key to the novel, perhaps the anchor around which everything else floats, is Patri's dream (the concept of dreaming itself a part of the dream). How to describe it? A philosophical/anthropological treatise on art, architecture, dream and the nature of (constructed) reality... Might unconstructed architecture be literature? the dreams asks us at one point [2] (as an aside, it's my favorite part of the book...)
What I haven't gotten my head around yet though is the ending. Without giving too much away, I might want to say that Patri doesn't want so much to escape time as much as she wants to escape the book itself...
UPDATE (8 Jul 13): Just realized that my concluding thoughts on this book are somewhat vague, and in-between-the-lines. In reality, I want to give it 3.5 stars because the ideas are more interesting than the execution, I think. That could be because of a not-quite-up-to-par translation, which is what I felt at times, while reading.
[1] There's a hilarious bit with Raúl's nephew shopping for the construction workers' lunch. The final bill at the supermarket comes to 49 australs (an invented currency for an invented world?) and he gives the cashier 50. No problem right? Nope, the cashier doesn't want to give one austral in change, and asks for exact change. A reference to the porteño obsession with having change for the bus fare?
[2] "There are societies in which the non-constructed prevails in an almost pure way, for example the Australian aboriginals... Without building anything, the Australians limit themselves to thinking and dreaming-while-awake the landscape in which they live, to the point of making it, with the force of story-telling, a 'construction' that is meaningful and complete... In civilized countries it happens everyday: it's the 'mental city', like Joyce's Dublin... Might non-constructed architecture be literature?" [page 61, my translation from the Italian]
"On the morning of the 31st of December, the Pagaldays went to see the apartment they'd bought at the construction site on Calle José Bonifacio 2161 with Bartolo Sacristán Olmedo, the gardener they'd hired to decorate their two large front and back balconies with plants." [my translation from the Italian]
The Pagaldays are a red-herring, as they have nothing to do with the story (except I suppose in their capacity as well-to-do Argentinians). Strange for them to be the first thing mentioned. The date is highlighted because the story takes place on that one day, and it's not just any day, but the last day of the year. The fact that they are visiting a not-yet-constructed (and not-yet-decorated) house is the clue. How does one go from the non-built (thought) to the built (reality)?
The first several pages are cinematic in that we are presented with various characters [1] in and around the not-yet-done apartment building in an unbroken montage (in fact the whole book has no breaks, unless you count paragraphs). But like a spinning wheel, the book finally stops on the family of Raúl Viñas and Elisa Vicuñas, Chileans living in a temporary apartment on the top floor while the building is under construction. Here's our real story. (One gets the impression there's a bit of Chile vs Argentina going on here, but without any background knowledge, there's not much I can say about that.)
Oh, and did I mention the ghosts? They can be seen floating in and around the building, all well-built men, cavorting and laughing and smiling mysteriously, bending their bodies in all manner of ways (Gombrowiczian immaturity?), even impersonating clocks. Everyone sees them, and they're just "normal" (Raúl goes so far as to store his wine in them...)
The key to the novel, perhaps the anchor around which everything else floats, is Patri's dream (the concept of dreaming itself a part of the dream). How to describe it? A philosophical/anthropological treatise on art, architecture, dream and the nature of (constructed) reality... Might unconstructed architecture be literature? the dreams asks us at one point [2] (as an aside, it's my favorite part of the book...)
What I haven't gotten my head around yet though is the ending. Without giving too much away, I might want to say that Patri doesn't want so much to escape time as much as she wants to escape the book itself...
UPDATE (8 Jul 13): Just realized that my concluding thoughts on this book are somewhat vague, and in-between-the-lines. In reality, I want to give it 3.5 stars because the ideas are more interesting than the execution, I think. That could be because of a not-quite-up-to-par translation, which is what I felt at times, while reading.
[1] There's a hilarious bit with Raúl's nephew shopping for the construction workers' lunch. The final bill at the supermarket comes to 49 australs (an invented currency for an invented world?) and he gives the cashier 50. No problem right? Nope, the cashier doesn't want to give one austral in change, and asks for exact change. A reference to the porteño obsession with having change for the bus fare?
[2] "There are societies in which the non-constructed prevails in an almost pure way, for example the Australian aboriginals... Without building anything, the Australians limit themselves to thinking and dreaming-while-awake the landscape in which they live, to the point of making it, with the force of story-telling, a 'construction' that is meaningful and complete... In civilized countries it happens everyday: it's the 'mental city', like Joyce's Dublin... Might non-constructed architecture be literature?" [page 61, my translation from the Italian]
funny
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No