Giobany Arévalo > Gabriela Torres Olivares >Anuar Jalife - Literal

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THE WORDS FLOW
John Pluecker
César Aira,
Ghost,
New Directions,
New York, 2008.
Translated
by Chris Andrews
From the fi rst minute I held César Aira’s
Ghosts in my hand, I was pleased. The cover
with its soft shadow darkening from bottom
to top. Its mysterious raised dot of white at
the center and raised lettering at the base.
The sparse design of the book drew me in.
Also its size. Its smallness. The fi rst few pages
are engrossing: Aira quickly drops the reader
into a whirlwind of activity in a condominium
tower under construction in Buenos Aires.;
builders, engineers, decorators, architects
busily prepare the tower for its future residents,
who coincidentally are touring their
soon-to-be home that very day. Their children
run excitedly through the shell of the
building. After some time with these busy,
frantic, wealthy people, they leave and we
are left in the building with a Chilean family,
the family of the watchman who lives at
the site. Their children continue to play: the
thought of children playing on these unembellished
concrete fl oors, these vast planes
with no walls to contain them produces a
tension that lasts until the fi nal sentence of
the book. What prevents them from falling?
We enter the fi nal day of the year with
the Viñas family, shopping, playing, work-
ing, napping, eating, drinking. All the while,
dusty, naked male ghosts wander though
the building, fl oating around aimlessly, unworthy
of note or explanation. The joy of
reading this book (and Aira in general) is his
uncanny ability to weave anecdotal (often bizarre)
twists of story-telling into a whole that
is resolutely experimental and destabilizing.
The careful prose of the book speeds along
gently with nary a wasted word or cliché.
The prose feels limber, fl exible; it bends and
stretches. The words are never heavy or plodding.
(No doubt, the masterful translation of
Bolaño translator Chris Andrews is to thank
here.) The words fl ow, refl ecting la huida hacia
adelante, the fl ight forward, that Aira has
mentioned in interviews. Aira is iconoclastic.
In interviews, he has insisted he does not
edit or plan the structure of his novels before
writing. He is more interested in the process
of writing, the commitment to artistic creation
than a fi nal product. He writes a page
a day and ends up published two or three
of these small novels each year, mainly with
small presses in Argentina.
In the midst of this continuous fl ow of
story, Aira includes a number of long philosophical,
sociological and architectural refl
ections on life, man, art, building and form
narrated in the voice of a teenage girl, Patri
Viñas. Aira delights in what is seemingly
(though actually not) tangential; he clearly
loves the refl ective mode. He leisurely explores
theory and the deep complexity of artmaking
with a language and a complexity of
thought seemingly foreign to this teenager
who becomes the axis for the second half of
the book. In one of these unconstrained soliloquies
in the voice of Patri, Aira refl ects on
the wisdom of the seemingly ignorant, the
philosophical depth of the apparently uneducated:
“A person might have never thought
at all, might have lived as a quivering bundle
of futile momentary passions, and yet at any
moment, just like that, ideas as subtle as any
that have occurred to the great philosophers
might dawn on him or her.” Aira is obsessed
with these moments and with writing these
moments in a nimble prose that moves
continuously on from one scene, from one
thought to the next.
The building where the Viñas family
lives is empty, a shell. The structure of the
novel (and its actual design as a book) seems
similarly shell-like–well designed, masterfully
constructed, perplexing. The structure with
54 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2009
no artifi cial boundaries or great adornment
is actually more exciting, more loaded with
potential than something fi nished, fully decorated
and fl eshed out. These half-fi nished
structures become spaces of play and diversion,
eliciting and allowing a sense of freedom
a fi nished structure could never provide.
In the end, this unfi nished world inhabited by
an immigrant family and a legion of ghosts
becomes a stage for a singular tragedy.
Who are these naked male ghosts? Who is
this happy family celebrating New Year’s Eve,
unconcerned with the ghosts around them?
Who is Patri and why is she increasingly obsessed
with these ghosts? Aira never answers
these questions. He is not interested in
explaining. Hopefully though, at the book’s
end, you, like me, will be so entranced by the
story that this freedom, this unfi nishedness,
this lack of fi xity only adds to its sad joy.
EL TIEMPO DE UNA ILUSIÓN
Pedro M. Domene
Félix J. Palma,
El mapa del tiempo,
Algaida, Sevilla, 2008.
La distinción entre pasado, presente y futuro
–escribió Albert Einstein– es una ilusión, aunque
se trata de una ilusión muy persistente,
tanto que la literatura universal se ha empleado
a fondo para desarrollar argumentos, tan
hermosos que han pervivido en el tiempo,
han cautivado a los lectores del pasado, divierten
en el presente y tal vez ocurra lo mismo
en el futuro. Un novela como El mapa del
tiempo (2009), de Félix J. Palma (Sanlúcar de
Barrameda, Cádiz, 1968), reconocido como
uno de los jóvenes escritores españoles más
originales, ofrece un singular viaje al Londres
de fi nales del siglo XIX, ese lugar donde parecía
que todo iba a ser posible y el desarrollo
científi co no tendría límites. Quizá por eso,
un escritor como H.G. Wells conseguía con
sus cuentos fantásticos y con su novela La