One of the best books I've read in a long time, so good I started over as soon as I finished. Now I am reading more by Aira. I don't know why I didn't read him before. The story takes place in an apartment building under construction. On New Year's Eve, the family who live on the top floor as caretakers while it's being finished host a family party. Many characters are followed through their errands of the day. The children play on the open floors; the construction workers drink outside. A crew of naked ghosts float by, observing. The huge lightness of this narrative is a wonder, the whole plot like a zepelin, enormous but buoyant, light and dark, frivolous and thoughtful, all aloft.

Apparently, according to Roberto Bolano, "Once you have started reading Aira, you don't want to stop." I disagree, and I do not do so respectfully. Not only did I urgently want "Ghosts" to be over, in fact I wish I had never read it. This book sucks because Aira's writing sucks (unless you are especially obsessed with dicks, as Aira is, in which case you will find plenty of interest here). It is a book, essentially, about nothing so much as ghost penises, and how Chileans are different from Argentines. And those are the good parts.The not good parts? How about the 10 pages when a barely-teenaged girl dreams about architectural symbolism as manifested by hut orientation of African tribes such as the Zulu and Mbutu? No, I am not making that up, although I wish I were. Obviously, Aira has never met a teenage girl, or he'd be pretty clear that this isn't exactly what they dream about. There's also how he doesn't really like women much. The greatest compliment they receive from Aira is when he describes two of the characters as "not completely stupid." High praise, that. Most of the time, however, Aira hammers on about how women are utterly "frivolous," caught up in their brainless pursuits like watching soap operas, cooking and tending children, and gossiping about the need for a "real man," and pregnancy. So important is it to have a "real man" that Elisa doesn't even mind living in poverty, in a temporary and unfinished rooftop shack, married to a pathetic alcoholic. Why? Because Raul is a "real man," of course. And according to Aira, the value of all men -- useless alcoholics and naked ghosts included -- is "obviously considerable." If you get the impression that this bullshit makes me want to punch someone in the head (preferably Aira), it does. But only slightly less than the fact that whole book is about a teenage girl (spoiler alert) being willing to kill herself because her sexual desires have been awakened by a bunch of naked ghosts, and she can only consummate these desires if she's dead... Oh. Awesome. I had hoped to find that modern males writing in Spanish would have moved slightly beyond the chauvinistic dick-love trope that was so prevalent at mid-century. To judge by Aira, they haven't. So much the worse for South American letters, not to mention South American women.

In the end I couldn't tell what this book was really about: the first 20 pages include a fair bit of social satire, since you see a number of rich Argentinian families visiting the site of the condominium they've bought into. Therefore my first thought was that the book was going to be about the incommunicability between rich and poor, and how the poor who service the needs of the rich remain "ghosts" for the the latter. But then the buyers disappear from the narrative, and we focus exclusively on a large family of immigrant Chilean workers who get to stay on the site for New Year's Eve because of delays in the construction. We spend a few pages with young Abel as he buys meat and coke for his uncle and his mates, then the narrative centers on Patri, a teen-aged girl who acts as a kind of au-pair for her brood of half-brothers and sisters. Eventually Patri gets invited to the New Year's Eve party thrown by the resident ghosts of the unfinished building, just as her own relatives gather for an actual party, complete with food, wine, and firecrackers. Since all the ghosts are covered in cement dust, they seem to be part of the same class as the Chilean immigrants, but what they ask of the girl is that she join them in death. Although this is a very short novel, it felt long because of all the digressions. Aira lost me when he discussed anthropological questions like the various building styles of aboriginal tribes. I was a lot more interested in his asides on the differences in the national character between Chileans and Argentinians, but could never tell whether he was pulling the reader's leg or being in earnest. Eventually I decided the story must be a kind of fable about puberty since there is so much about Patri and the ghosts, who are all male and naked. However, on the whole this is too much of a jumble and unless I missed something only South Americans can have access to, this novel is just rather aimless and slightly pretentious.