Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds

I’m moving from one coast to the other this week, so for the past several days I have been dusting shelves and sweeping floors, clearing my apartment of all the big and small things that I managed to accumulate in a little more than a year. In addition to bringing new and exciting pains to my back, the whole process has also yielded some interesting discoveries: while moving the headboard to my bed I sent a coven of spiders dancing in all directions; my couch had apparently been hiding a cryptically posed action figure this whole time; and I even found a basement room I had no idea existed. With the walls bare, my apartment looks like a very different and not entirely inviting space. Then again, I certainly didn’t ease my paranoid state of mind by spending my rare breaks reading Ghosts, César Aira’s eerie novel about a haunted apartment building under construction in Buenos Aires. While the tenants-to-be walk through the unfinished floors, imagining ideal placements for tables and beds, the construction workers—Chilean immigrants and poorer Argentineans—go about their tasks of dumping rubble and unloading bricks. But the workers and their families see what the apartment owners do not: they see the large, naked men coated in construction dust who float between the floors—the ghosts. Aira—one of Argentina’s most prolific contemporary writers—combines these unusual occupants with a New Years’ party, a curious teenage girl, and bizarre sociological tangents to create a strange and unsettling atmosphere that will make any move more interesting.

Francis Reynolds is an intern at Guernica. His interview with image theorist W.J.T. Mitchell appeared in April in Guernica’s blog. Read his last staff pick here.

Tags: books, staff recommendation

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