{"id":296486,"date":"2014-02-10T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/02\/10\/shantytown\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","slug":"shantytown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/02\/10\/shantytown\/","title":{"rendered":"Shantytown"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Aira\u2019s Shantytown<\/em>, while we\u2019re inside the characters\u2019 heads for a good portion of the story, the voice we read on the page is really that of Aira himself, as he works out the plot of the book he\u2019s writing. (Of course we are reading the words of Chris Andrews. This is his fifth Aira translation; he has perfected a beautifully baroque, rambling English to represent Aira\u2019s Spanish.) An Aira novel is characterized by an intellectual obsession, usually with some abstract concept, like \u201ctwins\u201d (in The Hare<\/em><\/a>) or \u201coriginality\u201d (in V\u00e1ramo<\/em>). Around this abstraction\u2014which is never named outright\u2014Aira spins a plot that lets him explore it in many aspects; the novels work best when the plot goes wildly far afield but continues to resonate with the concept in deep and unexpected ways. In Shantytown, the concept is something like \u201csensitivity,\u201d in the broad and multiple senses of emotional intelligence, pattern recognition, awareness of surroundings. A noir plot, where nothing is clear and everything is suspect, fits this theme well: the reader is forever on the run, fleeing forward with Aira, trying to get a fix on what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n

The central axis of the book is a road: Calle Bonorino, with a rich neighborhood of apartments and shops at one end and a shantytown at the other. Maxi, a high schooler from the rich end, helps the trashpickers and cardboard collectors from the shantytown cart their booty home. His foil is Cabezas, a police inspector gone rogue after his daughter is killed:<\/p>\n

\n

The gulf between the two men was evident in the forms of their respective enterprises, which although superposed were incompatible. Maxi\u2019s was linear, an adventure open to improvisation, like a path disappearing into the distance. The inspector\u2019s enterprise, by contrast, resembled the deciphering of a structure.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Add in drug dealers (\u201cproxidine\u201d gives its user the sense that all distance has been abolished), rich families employing shantytown maids, and a suspicious priest, and all the elements are in place for a glorious and confusing mess. At the climax, in an epochal rainstorm, details are literally flooded out.<\/p>\n

So much for the plot. But geography is not just a metaphor in Shantytown<\/em>; the characters themselves can\u2019t see details clearly. Maxi seems to be emotionally dulled or turned inward, perhaps on the autistic spectrum; he tells his love interest (although even that is weirdly deflected, in a mirror): \u201cEither you think about other people, or you pay attention to your surroundings. You can\u2019t do both at the same time.\u201d Aira the narrator can, though\u2014and he frequently puts the narrative on hold for thematic mini-essays:<\/p>\n

\n

Outsiders never went there [the shantytown], for a number of reasons, which all came down to one thing: fear. It\u2019s true that there was no real reason why outsiders would want to go there in the first place. But that was a part of the fear. And fear is the key to all places: social, geographical, even imaginary. It is the matrix of places, bringing them into existence and making it possible to move from one to another. Being or not being in a place depends on a complex system of actions, and it is well known that action engenders and nourishes fear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s this narrative perspective, self-aware but never cheaply ironic, that makes Aira such a blast to read. Aira has written scores of short novels in Spanish; New Directions has published nine translations so far, with a tenth due later this year. Aira fans thus get to witness the larger adventure of Aira\u2019s narrative invention itself\u2014and this book in particular has a lot to say on that theme. Late in the novel, Cabezas feels trapped: \u201cHe had to keep fleeing forward, but to where?\u201d Aira\u2019s compositional technique\u2014never changing anything once it is set down, only adding later deflections and specifications\u2014is referred to as \u201cflight forward\u201d; I\u2019ll bet this is the source of that phrase.<\/p>\n

Joan Didion famously wrote, \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.\u201d Aira\u2019s claim is similar:<\/p>\n

\n

People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel like it, or just like that, without knowing why, it\u2019s still you<\/em> doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it\u2019s not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn\u2019t have given it any more thought: you\u2019ve been thinking it out since you were born.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Aira\u2019s worlds always have something of the noir to them. We\u2019re always trying to decipher the structures, get things down in black and white; we\u2019re often frustrated, yet still compelled to follow the thinnest, most unpromising narrative thread towards a distant possible exit. At least there aren\u2019t always bodies piling up.<\/p>\n

The world is full of moral ambiguity, with no clear good or bad. Stiffs (and occasionally corpses) continue to pile up left and right. That\u2019s just the daily news\u2014hell, it\u2019s the whole world, whether it\u2019s a geopolitical or a neighborhood clusterfuck. So the narrative voice is what makes The Mongolian Conspiracy<\/em><\/a> and Shantytown<\/em> noir? But the pull of the voice applies to C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s other novels, to half the books I read\u2014it doesn\u2019t even have to be a tale of crime, just something human and murky, with a faint light of hope.<\/p>\n

Maybe noir doesn\u2019t really mean anything after all. Maybe nothing does. Maybe that\u2019s the whole point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Aira\u2019s Shantytown, while we\u2019re inside the characters\u2019 heads for a good portion of the story, the voice we read on the page is really that of Aira himself, as he works out the plot of the book he\u2019s writing. (Of course we are reading the words of Chris Andrews. This is his fifth Aira […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[7656,866,766,56,54996,53536,6516],"class_list":["post-296486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-argentine-literature","tag-cesar-aira","tag-chris-andrews","tag-new-directions","tag-owen-rowe","tag-shantytown","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338606,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296486\/revisions\/338606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}