Los fantasmas

It's the last day of the year in a building under construction in Buenos Aires. The building contains six luxury apartments, one per floor, and a rooftop pool. The apartments were supposed to be delivered on December 31st, but they're not finished. In the morning, the future owners visit the site, going up and down the building accompanied by the architect and decorators, while the construction workers continue their work. Around them all, naked ghosts float. They are strange and very natural presences in the hollow, uninhabited, and unfinished structure. Here, everything happens as if nothing were happening, as if we were holding in our hands a slow-burning narrative, meticulous in its physical descriptions of the setting and the interplay of light within its structure, strangely abstract in its detail, and strangely taut with the fantastical flight of the ghosts. But this is only the beginning. César's narrative genius Aira takes us into another story, and the pages that begin with the future inhabitants end with the night watchmen's New Year's Eve dinner... As in other Aira books, only upon finishing The Ghosts will everything fall into place and the meanings enhance retrospectively, in the absolutely unique and characteristic way of this fascinating writer.