carduelia_carduelis 's review for:

Ghosts by César Aira

4.0

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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