The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La villa (Shantytown). This is another highly original work from Aira, with a very complicated plot involving a boy from a wealthy family, who is not very bright but is very strong, helping scavengers from a nearby shantytown collect rubbish, with a view to selling anything of value. This is only the start of a story involving drug dealers, an evangelical church buying up gyms, crooked cops, gun-toting judges and a cataclysmic storm, with Aira having his usual philosophical ruminations, this time on perception and awareness and the value of the individual. As always from Aira, it is a highly imaginative and enthralling work.