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 like 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 likeness 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."
"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.
Likewise, 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."
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 like: minuscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself."
"That's what life was always like: 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."
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."
On 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 like 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 like what art does."
"This was a strange ambition for a judge: justice is like 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 like 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 like 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."
"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."
"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 like that, in its entirety."
"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 like that, in its entirety."
Is this really possible? Is our vision so
sharp we have the capacity to take in a large 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 like it, or just like 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 1949
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 like it, or just like 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 1949
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