Shantytown is Argentine author César Aira's 2001 quirky, scintillating novella that begins with kindhearted hulk Maxi helping poor men and women from Buenos Aires' Shantytown scavenge for garbage and ends with a parody of an action-packed, melodramatic Hollywood B movie.

Since César's literary aesthetic isn't so much about plot as it is creating a natural momentum propelling the story to take over and lead him as author into what he terms "the constant flight forward," - no revisions; forever onward to the next page - below are Shantytown quotes which lead me as reviewer into my own constant flight forward.

"These carts didn't have inscriptions or painting or anything that. They were purely functional, and since they were built from assembled odds and ends, their beauty was, in a sense, automatic or objective, and therefore very modern, too modern for any historian to bother with."

These carts are used by the Shantytown denizens to scavenge garbage. Curiously, I see a ness between those beautiful carts and the author's vividly cinematic and well crafted writing, writing with assembled asides and digressions, a breaking with traditional forms and a reader's usual expectations. Shantytown has thirteen chapters, thirteen modern carts, too modern and idiosyncratic for any literary historian to bother with. Well, maybe.

"It looked festive: a garland of ten little bulbs, a bunch of half a dozen, a circle of fifteen or twenty, or rows - single, double, triple - or just two bulbs and a third above them, making a triangle . . . Every kind of combination, all jumbled up, in a display of fanciful creativity."

Maxi's circadian rhythm has him awake at daybreak and asleep at sundown - nighttime means sleep and nothing but sleep for Maxi. Yet those lights hold so much wonder, a strange spectacle for the big man. wise, for Maxi, the ramshackle shantytown itself - streets and small houses, row after row, a mini magical mystery tour, an exercise in improvisation. Are we as awestruck turning the pages of Shantytown? How does our own circadian rhythm quicken our capacity to open to fiction's magic?

"Cabezas would watch from a distance, sometimes parking for a while and sitting in the car, sometimes driving around the block, following the progress of the meathead and the scavengers."

We can ask: how deep are Police Inspector Cabezas' false assumptions? Immediately pigeonholing people via such degrading categories as "meathead" and "scavengers" can speak to a lack of humanity and sense of decency. As we come to appreciate the more we follow Maxi, his lens on the world has an almost opposite focus to that of Cabezas.

"That's what life was always : minuscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself."

César speaks of the writing process as a combination of reason and madness, admitting his own predilection tends toward reason. But when madness pops up, for Aira or any other fiction writer, the intangible accidents are not far behind. Recall the "Intentional Fallacy" argument where the author’s reasoned intention is only a secondary and much less consequential consideration. In other words, emotion, inspiration, madness are central to the literary creative process, both for writer and reader.

"If someone added up all the time that individuals have spent achieving nothing, just to keep time ticking over, the sum total of centuries and millennia would be overwhelming."

This is one of the many peculiar philosophical meditations added in along the way. We usually think of history in terms of action and events but how much time is spent in each person's life before and after such recorded activity, time spent doing nothing? For a pure aesthete such as myself, and perhaps the author, doing nothing in "down time" is anything but empty; rather, it can be full to the brim with beauty and intense, pleasurable sensations.

"This was a strange ambition for a judge: justice is a zero-sum game; you could say that its mission, the essence of what it does, is to transform a situation without affecting the overall number of elements. Adding something new is more what art does."

I agree! To be an artist in the modern world is to create something new. If a judge thrives on the new and the glitzy, especially the novella's Judge Plaza with judicial police officers under her command bound together by "samurai mysticism and a blind obedience" who are thus rewarded by the most sophisticated weapons, watch out! Such justice is better remaining in Hollywood B movies.

"For some reason his face was horribly distorted by the electronic medium, becoming more grotesque with every passing second. It must have been because they were still scrambling to find real photographs and making do with artist's impressions."

César recognizes one of the more disturbing dimensions of modern mass media - the ability to intentionally distort images so as to control the viewer's reaction. Networks such as Fox News have become expert in distortion.

"The sea of error: the world. And he had to keep going, on and on, burdened with all the solipsisms of his sloppy thinking and a mass of information drawn exclusively from television, bits and pieces as random as the sequence of episodes in a dream."

Again, the final chapters conclude in a take off of a B-style movie, César plays with the ways in which television and movies will mold and control not only an audience's expectations of how events should unfold but also how one should take the movies as a model, a standard to weigh one's own life.

"Quite apart from the unusual circumstances, the spectacle was interesting from an intellectual and aesthetic point of view. No one had ever seen the shantytown that, in its entirety."

Is this really possible? Is our vision so sharp we have the capacity to take in an entire city neighborhood in its entirety? What would César Aira think?

Let me conclude with one of my favorite Shantytown quotes: "People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel it, or just that, without knowing why, it's still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it's not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn't have given it any more thought; you've been thinking it out ever since you were born."


César Aira, born 194989 s Jibran225 685

The sea of error: the world.

Good luck with trying to describe and capture the essence of this novella and, by extension, Aira’s fictions which are accurately labeled in the blurb as “mad invention.” Noirish, fairy tale-, hyper-real verging on the surreal, a free flow of crazy twists and improbable events all coming together to create a tragicomic ending…or not.

Here, the shantytown stands as a symbol for any large modern city and its seemingly intractable social conflicts fueled by wealth, power, faith, drugs and corruption. If you take a wider view, you realise that every metropolis behind its mask of beautiful streets, great buildings, and satisfied citizens is no better than a chaotic shantytown ridden with a thousand and one problems.

But that’s not the point of this story.

Here, we have people who are strangers to the places and neighbourhoods they inhabit, even if they don’t know that. They do things – good or bad – without a rationale, and when they appear to know the purpose of their actions, their miscalculations and miscommunications get them entangled in a web of events from which they don’t know how to extricate themselves.

That’s what life was always : minuscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself.
Here, people kill others with mistaken identity, cops apprehend wrong culprits, and media becomes a creator of reality rather than a medium of news. Here, people are the perpetrators as well as unsuspecting victims of the events taking place around them.

Aira’s books are always short, long short stories, but only insofar as page numbers are concerned. You need to read slowly and deliberately because although it might not take much time to read the text, it takes some effort to comprehend and digest what you’ve read.

It’s my third book and I’m totally sold. What skill, what ingenuity!

People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel it, or just that, without knowing why, it's still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it's not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn't have given it any more thought; you've been thinking it out ever since you were born."

October '19.hispanic54 s Mohammad Hrabal337 245

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??? ?? ?????????? ????? ?? ?? ??? ?? ??? ?????? ? ??? ???? ?? ?? ???? ??????? ???? ???: ???? ?? ??????? ???? ?????? ? ?? ?????? ?? ?????? ??????? ??? ???????. ????? ??? ?? ???????? ???????? ?? ?????? ??????? ?????????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ?????? ?????? ????????. ??????? ??? ???? ???????? ??? ?? ???????? ???????? ? ???? ??????? ????? ???? ?????? ??????? ????? ?? ??? ???????? ?? ?? ??? ???? ??? ?????: ?? ????? ???? ????? ???? ?? ??? ?? ??????? ??? ????. ???? ??? ????48 s Santiago González294 179

Espiral hacia el delirio

Tercera novela al hilo que leo de Aira. Creo que cuando uno se pone a leerlo tiene que saber que está ante un autor que está jugando. Que se ríe de todo, que rompe las reglas de los géneros, que los entrecruza. No es fácil recomendarlo. Es más, sus novelas me late que son los contrario del in-crescendo, como un des-crescendo, si cabe. Siempre arrancan muy arriba, con una idea original e interesante (en este caso un joven, diganos, ni ni, que se propone ayudar por que sí a los cartoneros (recolectores informales de basura o recicladores, para los que no son argentinos).

Las villas (favelas en Brasil, barrios en otros países) son un agujero negro misterioso para todos los que llevamos vidas burguesas; esas vidas de comprar libros, leerlos y comentarlos en redes sociales. Hay un gran atractivo ahí. Pero me late que Aira se aburre pronto de esa idea y escala hacia el delirio. Algo que me parece que repite en las otras novelas que leí (La liebre y La guerra de los gimnasios).

Siempre me resulta simpático, siempre hay una frase inspirada, que te queda marcada. Supongo que seguiré leyendo a Aira, aunque no sé cuando. Por lo pronto, si le dan el nobel, ya voy a poder presumir de haberlo leído. Cosas que te pasan si sos un pibe Goodreads.

==

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Gracias, te espero

Sant17 s Jeff BurseyAuthor 14 books178

As with other Aira books, I finish the last page and ask, how did he do that? Reading Aira has to be considered a great pleasure, and I'm very glad he has so many books out.12 s jeremy1,152 273

césar aira : literature :: coen brothers : cinema

you may never quite know what to expect going into it, but you can always be sure of a singular, engaging, imaginative, quirky, inimitable, and worthwhile experience.

aira's shantytown (la villa), while a bit un his previous works already available in english translation, feels just any other aira outing. although shantytown is without the genre-shifting that characterizes so many of his novel(la)s, there'd be no mistaking it for the work of another author.
it was so unexpected, and at the same time so horrifyingly opportune, that her whole being was seized by a spasm of terror, and she saw him as a bloodthirsty stegosaurus hoisting his rocky neck from a lake of oil, on the night of the end of the world. set in the flores district slums of buenos aires, shantytown follows maxi, a kind yet lubberly fellow who splits his time between working out at the gym and helping the neighborhood scavengers load their collected bounties. as an enigmatic drug, proxidine, proliferates, maxi soon finds himself (and his sister) entangled in the squalid district's violence. add in a few other shady characters, a wayward cop, a labyrinth of message-laden lighting and you have yet another impressive work from the prolific argentine master.
"...had he been able to use his gifts for good, he would have achieved great things, but he chose the infernal path of artificial contiguity." shantytown is the ninth of aira's works to be rendered from the spanish - with five or six dozen more to go. as his renown continues to grow stateside, presumably (and hopefully!) the estimable folks at new directions will see to it that another two or three titles are forthcoming each year. aira is undoubtedly one of the most original and refreshing voices coming out of south america and reading his books provides for a level of sheer enjoyment that may well parallel the fun he seems to have in writing them.

in an old interview with quarterly conversation, translator chris andrews described aira thus: "i think aira is just as exciting [as bolaño], and quite different. aira’s style, in most of his books (how i became a nun is exceptional) is limpid and simple. the sentences don’t have surprising shapes. but the stories take extremely surprising turns, sometimes jumping from one genre into another, leaving just about everyone wondering why... once you’re addicted to aira, you can be disappointed by a swerve that, but somehow you prefer being disappointed by him to being satisfied by many other writers."indeed.
fiction translation8 s Vilis640 110

Bija interesanti v?rot st?sta sl?d?šanu absurd?, ta?u reiz?m pras?j?s kaut ne k?ds atelpas br?dis. Cit?s gr?mat?s Airam ir lab?ks l?dzsvars. Bet nu, t? ir pirm? ?st? gr?mata, ko esmu izlas?jis sp?niski, prieks par to vien.7 s Stacia884 118

Wow. I loved it & cannot even begin to explain it. Descriptions do not do this wonderland of a novella justice. (I read those afterward; I went into this story blind.) I love literature that takes me by surprise & treats me to such a wonderful mix of elements. Fabulous & one I'd highly recommend.2018 book-covers-i-love favorites ...more7 s Rezvan30 24 Read

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Leí esta novelita en cuatro días y recién al segundo día me di cuenta de que de alguna manera quería definir cómo escribe Aira. Quizás definir es demasiado ambicioso y demasiado en línea con mi saussureanismo, pero por lo menos me gustaba pensar alguna idea que me permitiera pensar cómo es esa escritura, porque es evidente que algo me llamó la atención. Eso me pasó porque lo leía como muy fácil, avanzaba, tenía ganas de leer, me llevaba la escritura. Y después, ese segundo día, dije: la escritura de Aira es liviana, aireada como una medialuna que haría mi mamá, como un merengue que haría mi mamá. Me gusta mucho eso, porque es algo liviano, da placer leer así. La escritura te lleva. También me gusta que es como que la novelita se parte en dos en algún momento de la mitad, más o menos; al principio empieza con la narración desde el punto de vista de Maxi, que parece que es el protagonista, pero después el foco es como que va cambiando, rota a otros personajes, y el final aparece con la perspectiva de Cabezas, otro de los personajes. Otra cosa que me llamó la atención es que una sola vez aparece la voz en primera persona del narrador, cuando más cerca del principio dice: "como ya dije, Maxi vivía en la esquina de Bonorino y Bonifacio". En ningún otro momento aparece esa primera persona, y eso me lleva a pensar: ¿quién es esa primera persona? ¿Por qué aparece? ¿Es el propio Aira, que mira todo, pero solo aparece en esa escena en particular, encima en esa aclaración que perfectamente podría no estar? Es como si Aira metiera ahí esa aclaración para decir "bueno, acá hay alguien, hay una primera persona que está viendo algo", y le pareciera suficiente ponerlo solo ahí, y nunca más. argentina césar-aira siglo-xx6 s Andy Weston2,693 209

This is set up and summarised as a crime about a drug ring that operates in the slums of Buenos Aires, but that’s the vaguest of descriptions, more, it ponders over clashes between poverty and class, and insight into interactions between the city’s youth. It’s less of the thrilling, and more about the volatile relations in a corrupt police and the city’s poorest trying to survive.
It’s a sort of parody (of a detective story for example) in which you are expecting a takeaway message, but there isn’t a clear one. As the plot unravels it heads in unexpected directions, but these aren’t twists, just round corners set to confuse, that are often nonsensical, Aira making a point that it’s not about the plot.
It’s to be admired as a different form of storytelling, a book that doesn’t adhere to the structure of contemporary writing. There are discoveries to be made, but not necessarily the expected solutions to the crimes. At just over 120 pages, it’s certainly worth the investment of time to read.argentina noir novella ...more5 s Barbara1,750 26

Maxi, a middle class twenty-something, who has nothing to fill his days except visits to the gym. He begins observing and following the cardboard collectors who make their rounds daily just minutes before trash is collected. Having lived in Brazil, I also saw people hauling carts around the city center, stacked with cardboard. This book is set in the late 90's, the same time I lived in southern Brazil. Having seen the brilliant Brazilian film Trash, I know that many of the people who scrapped out a living collecting trash, have been left with nothing to gather, thanks to recycling. This book that describes Buenos Aires' shantytowns in a way that reduces the threat of the places, and portrays them as full of humanity. An example of some of the enchanting prose is " "The electricity cables, as numerous and chaotic as the buildings they connected, reinforced the shantytown's allegiance to the world of dreams". Many of the residents are migrants from Peru and Bolivia who are illegally living in Argentina. Maxi decides to apply all the strength he has developed by helping the cardboard collectors pull their carts. Each day he comes closer and closer to the shantytown and finally enters it. Maxi, all the characters in the story, seems to lack social skills and is unable to remember faces. While this isn't named as a disability, it clearly is. Other characters seem unable to figure out the simplest things. The main character is actually a corrupt cop who believes there is another man with the same name,Cabezas,who lives near the shantytown. By the end of the story, we are not sure if there are two Cabezas' or only one. This book is set in 1999, was published in 2001, but only translated to English in 2013. I will be looking for more of César Aria's work.2014-reads around-the-world latin-america5 s Jim2,199 715

Picture to yourself a circular shantytown with streets branching diagonally toward the center -- but never quite getting there. Marking each street heading into the area are decorative lights arranged in various recognizable patterns.

Heading toward this shantytown is big, stupid, but kind Maxi. Following him is his sister Vanessa and her girlfriend Jessica. Following the girls is crooked cop Ignacio Cabezas (who is being mistaken for another man -- a bereaved father of a slain teenaged girl -- with the same name). And following Cabezas is Judge Plaza, a Valkyrie of justice followed by her incorruptible samurai squad of police. This chase leads a vector pointing at the shantytown.

But it never quite makes it. After all, this is César Aira we are talking about, that unidirectional arrow of modern literature. At first, I didn't Shantytown, but toward the middle, it seemed that Maxi's routine came to a halt, and the mad chase began in earnest.

Buenos Aires has hundreds, maybe thousands, of scavengers referred to as cartoneros. They pick through all the garbage cans before the municipal trash trucks beat them to it, and it is these people that Maxi gets involved with, helping them a musclebound boy scout. Little does he know that the shantytown is the main distribution point for that insidious drug proxidine.

Does this novelette come to a conclusion? Does anything? The vector goes into the circle in the middle of a giant thunderstorm, and then -- poof!argentina short-fiction5 s S?e?a?n?904 465

For someone as sensitive as he was to the passing hours of the day, the winter dusk was bound to have a meaning. But what was it? The meaning without a name, in other words: nothing. The meanings all fell away, or revealed how empty they had been from the start. Hardly anything hapens, after all, in an individual life: most of the time is spent working to survive and then recovering from work. If someone added up all the time that individuals have spent achieving nothing, just to keep time ticking over, the sum total of centuries and millenia would be overwhelming. By comparison, history is a miniature. But history is a condensation of facts, an intellectual contrivance that artificially gathers together the little that happened in the vast, half-empty expanses of real time. 2018 new-directions5 s Lautaro Varela24 4

Maxi, el protagonista de esta novela, es un pibe de unos 20 años, hijo de un comerciante del barrio de Flores, que no estudia ni labura. Descripto como un gigante fortachón bastante ingenuo, Maxi pasa las mañanas enteras en el gimnasio dándole duro a los fierros y por las tardes ayuda desinteresadamente a los cartoneros que andan por el barrio, cargando sus pesados carros hasta las puertas de la villa. El contexto es finales de los noventa, con la crisis en ciernes, época en que los cartoneros empezaron a verse con mayor frecuencia en las calles de Buenos Aires.
Aunque Aira se valga de este escenario para dar vida a su relato, enseguida podemos advertir que La villa no tiene pretensión alguna de ser una novela de crítica social o algo por el estilo; más bien, es el puntapié para hacer otra cosa. A partir del tercer o cuarto capítulo (cuando el escritor pringlense ya te tiene más o menos metido en el bolsillo) empieza a proliferar una serie de personajes que interactúan entre sí, y a desatarse una trama pseudopolicial, que va de malentendido en malentendido hasta terminar en un delirio de proporciones descomunales. Al respecto, Martín Kohan dice lo siguiente en la contraportada del libro:
"Otra literatura hubiera hecho con esto realismo o neorrealismo social. Aira hace cosas bien distintas: ensaya delirios, trama desvíos, prueba desmesuras, produce irrealidades. Pero no ha dejado de tocar por eso lo más real de lo real."
Es la primera vez que leo a Aira, y debo decir que dentro de todo la pasé bien. La villa es una novelita ligera, entretenida y, por momentos, bastante desopilante. Ante el exceso de realismo y del yo-yo-yo de mucha literatura de hoy, no parece una mala idea clavarse un Aira de vez en cuando.argentina novela4 s2 comments KeithAuthor 10 books254

I tried to read Shantytown about a year ago but I was conscious toward the end that I was just letting the words run past my eyes without catching, and when I hit the last page I didn't know what I'd read.

Now upon finishing it "for real," I'm aware that Shantytown might be the first Aira novel I've read that is actually too smart for me to grasp, even when I was paying attention. Aira's books often do, this is a novel that does not end anywhere near where it began -- instead, it free-associates to an absurd degree, switching between characters and plots with increasing rapidity from beginning to end. But un his other novels, this book is actually about this free-association, rather than just being a function of Aira's style.

The book begins as a story about a middle class young man who helps the poor "cardboard collectors" in his neighborhood transport the trash they scavenge each morning back to the shantytown where they live. But it's also about the man's family and gossipy neighbors, who seem to play an endless game of real-life telephone in their ongoing miscommunications about their daily lives. And it's about a corrupt local policeman's investigation into a strange new street drug that, when taken, "changes the proximity of things."

The theme these different plots share is about the relationships between disparate things -- people of different classes, neighbors with drastically different interpretations of shared experiences, and a magical drug that connects everything it touches. It's got the closest thing to a plot in any Aira book I've read, a sort of Coen Bros-esque crime story in which coincidence and fate overlap.

It's excellent. It's hard to get through without a lot of patience and focus in order to keep all the narrative balls in the air. I wish I'd got through it a year ago, because now I'll have to wait awhile until I try it again to see if I understand it.3 s MohammadHosein24 9

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When I got this book during Christmas, I was in love with its tiny size. It's a novella so of course it's short, but it's also tiny. Square shaped and thin, the type of book you can take anywhere. If you're a man or a person that wears men's clothing, you will have the privilege of reading this and shoving it in your pocket just your wallet. Oh I hate you, fashion industry.

Anyway, to the story. What the hell is this little book about? It's about a guy who discovers a shantytown, a town with shanty houses and light bulbs everywhere, the presence of this town is bright and aware at night. The guy who discovers it is a bit, I guess I can say, slow and shy. All he has to defend himself are the muscles on his body. He also has a sister and a friend who later discover this town. This little whimsical town becomes the target of a corrupt police officer named Ignacio Cabezas (I hope this is his name, because I read this awhile ago.) You can guess what happens, this cop or detective wants to end a drug circle thing, and accuses the town of being the place that contains it. He does everything in his power to get there. So, this is sort of a noir. I've been reading noirs, shocker. You have to read it to understand what I mean.

I freaking love this book. It's really crazy how this guy managed to fit in this mystery in this small book. It's not long, 162 pages, and I honestly feel this is the best length for mystery or noir. I tend to get fidgety when I read a mystery book that's 400-500 pages. But this has been one of my faves of the year so far.

This novella is written in third person, allowing the reader to draw the lines and paint the images, to notice the incoming meteor of evidence, slowly, inch by inch. Aira's prose is poetic and humorous at times, in third person, his characters are very much alive, without being dry about it. The main character was just so loveable, his shy nature and general ditziness, makes him for a refreshing character. Most muscular characters are strong, brave, and ready to rescue, but in this case, he's a manchild.

The plot is itself is simple and the characters are all tied in somehow with the whole plot. Each one has a conflict or some sort of incident to solve. The twist at the end was sort of expected. Actually I don't think it was a twist. The writing is cinematic and beautiful, almost fairy tale . I loved the writing more than the plot, which was slightly slow, and not the most original. But the whole little town atmosphere and the lurking darkness beneath, especially when the town began flooding with rain, as if nature itself could sense the incoming evil, can appeal to both noir and literary fiction lovers. The story is a tad bit repetitive and absurd (such as the main characters favorite hobby of pushing shopping carts for the shanty town people) as it grows little by little revealing everything by rotating in the same area, because the small town theme. The guy goes in the same path every day and does the same thing every day. I don't really have anything else to say, but if you love Roberto Bolaño, I suggest you get on this. I kind of his writing style better than Bolaño. Please don't kill me.

Rating: 4.5/5

Originally posted here:
http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot....books-i-smother-with-love-actual-f2 s Tom LichtenbergAuthor 79 books76

Cesar Aira is known for his improvisational style, how he just makes it all up as he goes along and never looks back or revises, but in Shantytown he provides this fascinating definition of improvisation: "People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel it, or just that, without knowing why, it’s still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it’s not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn’t have given it any more thought: you’ve been thinking it out ever since you were born."

Shantytown does seem somewhat more "thought out" than some of the other currently translated Aira books, in the sense that the plot leads on more or less in a straight line, but the others you're never quite sure of that, or even where the line begins. At first we are following a young bodybuilder through the streets as he generously assists rag-and-bone collectors. Maxi is all innocence and obscurity. He doesn't think - or see - very clearly. He's just going along, doing what he does, a kind of "nice guy" who has no idea what to do with himself, other than random, trivial good deeds. "It was as if someone had made it his job to give up his seat on the bus." He's given to fuzzy insights, such as "however early you go out, you always see people who are out already", but mainly he's minding his own business and we, the readers, are along for the ride, watching him and wondering "what the hell is this guy up to?"

And just at that point we discover that we're not the only ones following and watching him. There's a corrupt cop on the case, and in one of those moments of utter surprise and transformation, the novel completely turns as one person after another becomes involved in a cat-and-mouse intrigue based on a chain of whisper-down-the-lane type misunderstandings. The story becomes quite suspenseful and the tension builds during a tumultuous downpour where limited visibility collides with partial comprehension to form a chaotic cataclysmic climax.

The novel ultimately proves its point, that "that’s what life was always : miniscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself."
latin-american-literature twenty-first-century-literature2 s Carlos Puig510 36

Novela terminada en 1998 y publicada el 2001.

César Aira es un escritor prolífico, divergente, lúdico. Ha publicado más de un centenar de novelas. Es la segunda que leo de este autor.

En esta novela nos presenta a Maxi, un joven fortachón de clase acomodada al que no le cruje mucho el mate y pasa mucho tiempo en el gimnasio. Es un tipo ingenuo y bonachón. Se dedica a ayudar en sus labores a los grupos de cartoneros de una villa de Bajo Flores. La rutina del joven patovica (me encantó esa palabra) , su motivación y personalidad ocupan las primeras páginas del relato. Luego aparece en escena un policía bastante particular y empieza a complicarse la trama. Las drogas, un crimen, la búsqueda de justicia, la delgada línea que separa al bien del mal, el papel de las autoridades y el rol de la prensa son algunos de los ingredientes que se manejan en la historia. César Aira juega con los estereotipos y los modelos literarios de una forma atractiva y desconcertante, a veces. Tiene oficio de sobra y es capaz de atraparte en un relato, aunque no sepas muy bien para dónde va la cosa. He disfrutado sus novelas y espero seguir conociendo otras de sus obras.


César Aira ha recibido importantes distinciones, entre las que destacan el Premio Roger Caillois 2014, el Premio Iberoamericano de Narrativa Manuel Rojas 2016 y el Premio Formentor 2021.

Recomiendo también leer las entrevistas que se le han hecho, ya que siempre formula ideas originales, opiniones y reflexiones interesantes, no exentas de polémica.2 s Nathan Marone231 7 Read

Cesar Aira's working method, which I knew about going in on my first book of his, is on full display here.

Reading Shantytown is the narrative equivalent of an ADD diary. Though tied to a story in a only the loosest of ways, this short book jumps around with incredible ease; within a few pages Aira can give you a character sketch, a remarkable description of urban life, muse on the socio-economic complexities of Buenos Aries, go on a surrealist/absurdist bent, create a new story line that he will never pick up again, or simply wax eloquent with philosophy.

The effect, of course, is uneven. There are flashes of real genius here on nearly every page. But the sum of its parts never really add up. That is, I assume, because Aira isn't really that interested in the whole of a work. His mind, every other mind, shifts daily with new concerns and fresh imaginations. His work is unpredictable, which makes it exciting. It's also short, which keeps that unpredictability from turning into exasperation. 2 s Cymru RobertsAuthor 2 books89

Interesting bit of science fiction here... I had to lower my cynicism deflector shields in the beginning because I wanted to write Aira off as a second-rate Bolaño, which he is in a way, but he demonstrates enough imaginative power here to stand on his own.

There were some awesome sentences spread throughout and the overall vibe was very 1980's, or more a sitcom from the 2080's, when 80s culture comes back in style only in this futureworld there are clones and proxidine.

I think I read somewhere that Aira writes a page or two each day, down at some coffee shop by his house. This book seemed the work of that pattern: new characters, plotlines, and tones emerged with every chapter. This was cool, but unsurprisingly, character development and overall effect suffered at times. It was some days he'd been glugging only decaf. I'd check him out again though, there's definitely something there.latin-american1 Dorie740 2

Shantytown
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