10/28/14

Ricardo Piglia combines his trademark avant-garde aesthetics with astute cultural and political insights into Argentina’s history and contemporary condition




Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City, Trans. by Sergio Waisman. Duke University Press Books, 2000. [1992.]



Widely acclaimed throughout Latin America after its 1992 release in Argentina, The Absent City takes the form of a futuristic detective novel. In the end, however, it is a meditation on the nature of totalitarian regimes, on the transition to democracy after the end of such regimes, and on the power of language to create and define reality. Ricardo Piglia combines his trademark avant-garde aesthetics with astute cultural and political insights into Argentina’s history and contemporary condition in this conceptually daring and entertaining work.
The novel follows Junior, a reporter for a daily Buenos Aires newspaper, as he attempts to locate a secret machine that contains the mind and the memory of a woman named Elena. While Elena produces stories that reflect on actual events in Argentina, the police are seeking her destruction because of the revelations of atrocities that she—the machine—is disseminating through texts and taped recordings. The book thus portrays the race to recover the history and memory of a city and a country where history has largely been obliterated by political repression. Its narratives—all part of a detective story, all part of something more—multiply as they intersect with each other, like the streets and avenues of Buenos Aires itself.
The second of Piglia’s novels to be translated by Duke University Press—the first was Artifical Respiration—this book continues the author’s quest to portray the abuses and atrocities that characterize dictatorships as well as the difficulties associated with making the transition to democracy. Translated and with an introduction by Sergio Waisman, it includes a new afterword by the author.


The Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City reflects upon the retrieval of the past as a prerequisite for healing from national trauma. If postdictatorship countries are to implement a transition to democracy, their citizens must confront the past. The denial of national trauma perpetuates tyranny. Taken together, the many fragmented stories in Piglia’s novel can be viewed as a metaphor for the process of retrieving a repressed history. The central trope of the novel is Elena, a gendered machine made responsible for integrating Argentina’s past dissociations and making healing possible. - Irene Wirshing


This futuristic and fragmented detective novel blurs the lines between fact and fiction as it meanders through the life and mind of Junior, a reporter at a daily newspaper in Buenos Aires. Aided by Fuyita, a Korean gangster, and a scarred but beautiful woman named Julia, Junior is investigating a machine that contains the memory and mind of Elena, who is based on the real-life wife of Argentine writer Macedonio Fern ndez. Using different stylistic voices, Elena is telling stories. The state police, who fear her revelations about official atrocities against the Argentinean people, are also tracking her down and hope to deactivate her. The metaphoric, disembodied voice of Elena weaves through the overlapping narratives that support the novel and drive it forward, allowing for linguistic critiques and evocations of Argentina's troubled past, particularly the Dirty War, when ""everyday life went on in the middle of the horror."" Throughout the book, language itself is a protagonist, with long, quasi-academic passages describing the instability and transience of verbal communication. References to Argentine writer/politicians and James Joyce may prove puzzling to some readers. With its intriguing but demanding phrasing and images that confuse and entice, the novel at times requires detective work to solve its hermetic riddles. Though sometimes rarefied, this slim volume is pleasurable and rewarding. (Dec.) FYI: The Absent City has been performed as an opera in Argentina. - Publishers Weekly

First published in 1992, this highly allusive and inventive novel from the Argentine author of Artificial Respiration (1994), etc., employs a memorable metaphor for the lingering echoes of his country’s wretched “dirty war” of 1976–83. It’s a machine, invented by the widower of a “disappeared” woman, in which her memories (they of course detail their crimes against humanity) are stored As a well-meaning reporter searches for “Elena’s machine,” so do her murderers, while Piglia portrays a tragically transformed and disfigured futuristic Buenos Aires, echoing images of its history in the works of his predecessors (including Borges, Roberto Arlt, and the forgotten Macedonio Fernandez), and with telling reference to this brilliant work’s direct ancestor: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Piglia may be the best Latin American writer to have appeared since the heyday of Gabriel García Márquez. The Absent City, in any case, is a masterpiece. - Kirkus Reviews
A very famous and at the same time controversial author that finally had the chance to read. La Ciudad Ausente is a novel that seems to be constructed above a structure that is a homage to some of the greatest Argentinian writers in the XX century, basically Borges and Bioy Casares. This post modernist novel is a collage of many techniques and extracts many things from different authors that makes it an interest construction: Orwell, Camus, Bolaño and some others play an important role in how this novel is written. I'll try to put some examples.
The most evident feature is The Machine, "built" by Macedonio Fernández, a real character who happened to be a writer in Argentina in the first half of the XX century. This intelligent machine (because it learns on his own) recreates images and passages that some people lived, but it doesn't stop there, it also develops the story and makes it richer. Obviously this has a huge influence of Bioy Casares, La Invención de Morel.
La clave es que aprende a medida que narra. No hará necesariamente historias más lindas, pero sabrá las historias que ha hecho y quizá termine por construirles una trama común

No se trata de una máquina, sino de un organismo más complejo. Un sistema que es pura energía.
There are also parts of the novel that are clear influences by Borges:
El Museo era circular, como el tiempo en la llanura     

En el caparazón de las tortugas se dibujaban los signos de un lenguage perdido. Los nudos blancos habían sido en el origne, marcas en los huesos, el mapa de un lenguage ciego común a todos los seres vivos. La serie de figuras eran el fundamento de un idioma pictográfico. A partir de esos núcleos primitivos , se habían desarrollado a lo largo de los siglos todas las lenguas del mundo
The characters he creates are very similar to the ones that create Roberto Bolaño, with very interesting stories that are not always fully developed. However I think that Bolaño is way better at giving them importance in the story. In Absent City, Laszlo Malamud, an Hungarian writer that learned Spanish by reading the Martín Fierro, the story of the scientist studying the "Nudos Blancos" and the girl who imagined reality was a projection of her personality, are all of them interesnt constructions of a character that are not fully developed, at least not as we wish.
He also includes a very dense atmosphere that could be compared with the one present in 1984, where the states seems to control everything and the citizens are always oppresed even by their own mind.
It is a good novel, that however, doesn't allowed me to decipher a real own style on Piglia. I'll need to read more of his books to catch him out, or keep proving he's more of a compiler and developer of good shared ideas, just like The Machine he describes in the novel.
His first novel after 13 years, Blanco Nocturno, was published last year, so far with great comments and a positive review by the critics. Maybe I'll try to read this one before what seems to be his greatest novel, Respiración Artificial.
P.S. Sorry for not quoting in English, but I read the novel in Spanish and I'm very lazy to translate. - Daniel del Real  


 

Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration, Trans. by Daniel Balderston. Duke University Press Books, 1994. [1981.]


read it at Google Books

Acclaimed as one of the most important Latin American novels in recent decades, Artificial Respiration is a stunning introduction for English readers to the fiction of Ricardo Piglia. Published in Argentina in 1981, it was written at a time when thousands of Argentine citizens "disappeared" during the government’s attempt to create an authoritarian state. In part a reflection on one of the most repressive and tragic times in Argentine history, this is one of those rare works of fiction in which multiple philosophical, political, and narrative dimensions are all powerfully and equally matched.
As a prize winning detective novel, Artificial Respiration reaches through many levels of mystery to explore the forces that have been at play in Argentina throughout its violent history. The narrator, a writer named Renzi, begins to look for an uncle who has vanished, a man he knows only through a web of contradictory family stories and an exchange of letters. Through these letters he learns about his uncle’s research into the life of Enrique Ossario, secretary to the 19th-century Argentine dictator Rosas and spy for the dictator’s enemy. As Renzi’s search leads further into his uncle’s work and to conversations with his literary and chess-playing friends, the reader is led by Piglia to consider the nature of Argentine identity, its literature and history, and its relation, for example, to Europe, exile, and democracy. Finally, and made most vividly appreciable by the retelling of a story in which Kafka meets Hitler, it is the encounter between literature and history that is explored.
A richly textured, intricately crafted, and startling mixture of storytelling, inquiry, and speculation, Artificial Respiration has established its author among the leading representatives of contemporary Latin American letters. - Publishers Weekly



Published in Argentina in 1981 when that country still labored under authoritarian rule, Piglia's ambitious, multivalent novel explores the abrasive relationship between the human imagination and human history. Piglia, very much in the tradition of Latin American masters like Borges and Cort†zar, employs a labyrinthine plot to worry knotty metaphysical and political questions. Sometimes a detective novel, sometimes a fictional probe of Argentine history, the book is plastic enough to concoct a confrontation between Kafka and Hitler. Piglia's compatriot, Ariel Dorfman, hails it as ``one of the most important Latin American novels of the last decade.''  - Kirkus Reviews


Owing to the dictatorship’s restrictions on political activity and public debate, the risks of speaking out were enormous. Although ever present, repression could be acknowledged only in private, far from watchful eyes and untrustworthy ears. Thus, resistance was practiced from behind the protective cover of silence. In 1980, Ricardo Piglia published Artificial Respiration – a novel that metaphorically discussed state violence and censorship through allegory. The book immediately became a channel through which a community of survivors could tacitly shed light on the possible causes of a shared national ordeal.
The novel tells the story of a writer, Renzi, who sets out in search of his uncle, professor Marcelo Maggi – a nonconformist historian with un-orthodox ideas – who has mysteriously “disappeared”. Piglia uses this central anecdote as a pretext for digression into a discussion of national cultural traditions and the history of violence that has haunted Argentina from its inception. In the following passage, Renzi converse with Vladimir Tardewsky, a polish intellectual who may or may not have the key to Marcelo Maggi’s location. What begins, as an enquiry rapidly becomes a long and erudite debate on the role of Europeanism in Argentina literary self-perception. Like Piglia, his characters believe that the explanation and possible redemption of an age intolerant of intellectual freedom are encrypted in the politics of literature. - Christian Patracchini


Ostensibly a novel, Argentine author Ricardo Piglia's Artificial Respiration reads more like an agonized dissertation.  Set in Argentina during the Dirty War, the novel examines a phenomenon that scholars refer to as "cultural hybridity."
According to a study at the Annual Students & Graduate Conferences at Humbolt:
Cultural hybridity has been a term to describe societies that emerge from cultural contacts of European "explorers" and those "explored". Instead of explaining these contacts as mere imposures of a major culture onto a minor culture, hybridity emphazises their mutual intermingling.  
And, of course, Argentina is the prime example of a culturally hybrid nation, with its American and European influences.
Artificial Respiration is the story of a man named Renzi who leaves Bueno Aires to search for a long lost uncle, Maggi, in a rural village called Entre Ríos.  Renzi hopes to discover the truth about his uncle, who it is rumored, is a traitor to his country.
Piglia relates the story by way of letters written between Maggi and Renzi, or in long, rambling conversations --conversations in which it is rarely clear who is speaking.  The principles of the story, Renzi, his sickly and aging patron, the Senator, and a Polish writer named Tardewski, expound on the current state of affairs and speculate on the influences of various artists, philosophers, and writers on Argentina.
Toward the end of the novel, Tardewski relates a very interesting story from his days as a student.  He describes searching through the archives of the library of the British Museum in London and coming upon some letters written by writer Franz Kafka.  In these letters, Kafka describes some encounters in Prague with a young Austrian Anti-Semite named Adolph!  (What history geek doesn't love to speculate about encounters between historical figures?)
It is important, I think, to remember that Piglia wrote this novel in 1980, as Argentina was in the midst of its Dirty War.  During that period, which lasted from 1973 through 1983, Argentina was ruled by a right-wing military junta, which "disappeared" as many as 30,000 Argentine trade-unionists, left-wing activists, students, journalists, Marxists, and "inconvenient" witnesses.  Argentina endured systematic, government-sponsored rape, torture, and murder in those years.
In the novel, Piglia does not directly speak of the Dirty War.  I imagine it would have been dangerous to do so.  But, the novel's protagonist, Renzi, never does find his Uncle Maggi.  Readers are left to wonder if Renzi's uncle has joined the ranks of the "disappeared."  Is this an oblique protest?
Mostly, I found Piglia's novel to be difficult and inaccessible. I think, in order to fully appreciate it, one needs be steeped in Argentine history, culture, and art.  I, unfortunately, am not.
Artificial Respiration is the voice of a tortured nation.  I am glad, at least, that I gave ear. - Dade Cariaga

Image result for Ricardo Piglia, Assumed Name,
Ricardo Piglia, Assumed Name, Yvette E. Miller, Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995.


The stories in Assumed Name, written before the 1976 military coup d'etat in Argentina, invoke a stark socio-political situation that foreshadows the repressive dictatorship that the country was to suffer from 1976 to 1983. But the plight of the marginalized characters in these stories is also a universal one, as they search for ways to communicate and live with each other, and to come to terms with the reality in which they find themselves. "Assumed Name", the novella which gives its title to the collection, is a unique and fascinating piece - doubling at times as literary criticism - reminiscent of the style exemplified by Jorge Luis Borges' work. The author himself is the protagonist attempting to solve the mystery of an unpublished manuscript allegedly written by the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt.


Love and betrayal complicate a robbery gone wrong in this edgy true-crime novel based on a 1965 Argentine bank robbery. There's the drama of the botched raid itself, followed by a blowout afterparty, an attempted double-crossing of the corrupt local authorities, and a final shootout where, as a last act of rebellion, the robbers burn all the loot. This gritty tale has been adapted for a major motion picture by renowned Argentine director Marcelo Pinyero. - Dedi Felman


Argentinian writer and critic Piglia (Artificial Respiration) borrows shamelessly from Borges and other postmodern writers in this eponymous novella and five accompanying short stories-now translated 20 years after their first appearance in Spanish. But that borrowing is a conscious aesthetic choice that underscores a recurring theme in this cerebral collection: originality is a myth. Consonant with this theme, seemingly separate stories-all of which are set in Argentina between the 1950s and the 1970s-touch in tangential ways. ``The End of the Ride,'' for example, focuses on a journalist named Emilio Renzi returning home by a series of indirect train routes to face a host of mysteries surrounding his father's suicide. Renzi then reappears as a minor character in the title novella, which, in turn, focuses on a literary scholar named Ricardo Piglia, who's reconstructing the shadowy circumstances in which an unpublished (and fictional) story by the famous (and actual) Argentinian author Roberto Arlt was written. The tales are thick with inside jokes and references to Argentinian history and culture. Collectively, they try to dissolve the strict divisions between fact and fiction, reality and dreaming and, ultimately, as far as a reader is concerned, literature and criticism. - Publishers Weekly

MONEY TO BURN by Ricardo Piglia


Ricardo Piglia,  Money to Burn, Trans. by Amanda Hopkinson, Granta, 2003.

Based on original reports and witness statements, Money to Burn tells the story of a gang of bandits who, fancying themselves as urban guerrillas, raided a bank in downtown Buenos Aires. They escaped with millions in cash but six weeks later found their hideout surrounded by three hundred military police, journalists and TV cameras. The subsequent siege and its shocking outcome have become a Latin American legend. In Money to Burn, the renowned author and critic Ricardo Piglia has turned myth into thriller. His combination of sharp pschycological insight and witty dialogue, shot through with the variant mores of sexual transgression and prison subcultures, created an international bestseller and won the Planeta Prize. Money to Burn has also been made into a film (Plata quemada), directed by Marcelo Piñeyro and winner of the Goya Prize for Best Foreign Film.


Piglia, one of Argentina's best-known contemporary writers (Absent City ; Artificial Respiration ), again delivers his signature blend of noirish crime and social commentary in this provocative tale of a 1965 Buenos Aires bank robbery and its bloody aftermath, based on a real crime. The story is simple, but Piglia gives it depth by focusing on the sexed-up, drug-abusing, reckless robbers whose actions shocked Argentina. They are Dorda, the mentally unbalanced assassin; Brignone, the passionate youngster; Mereles, the shady ladies' man; and Malito, their compulsive boss. After stealing millions from the bank, the men, high on cocaine and self-congratulation, escape to a small hideout in Montevideo and await the return of their leader, stocking up on food, alcohol, drugs and weapons. Despite their eagerness to start a new life in New York City, they fall into a delirium of memories brought on by whiskey and sex. While they binge, 300 police officers follow a tip and surround their hideout along with TV crews and reporters. Heading the raid is Police Commissioner Silva, a dirty cop eager to cover up department scandals. A long, bloody, drug-fueled battle erupts between the reckless desperados and the officers, which becomes the source of Argentinean legend. By drawing on witness statements and police reports, Piglia proves that the bandits' raid was not just about the money; it was about freeing themselves from their old lives. The plotting is choppy, the ending predictable and many of the action sequences run out of gas, but Piglia's remarkably precise descriptions and feel for his characters keep the novel's engine churning. - Publishers Weekly

The Argentinean author of Artificial Respiration (1994) and The Absent City (2000) brilliantly re-creates a notorious, real-life 1965 Buenos Aires bank robbery and its aftermath.
Piglia’s semidocumentary structure embraces both the aforementioned event and its perpetrators, their associates, and victims. A tense opening sequence introduces the “twins” (devoid of family connection or physical resemblance): “Gaucho” Dorda (“The born criminal, the man who had been ruined since boyhood”) and Franco “Kid” Brignone, a cunning, soulless spoiled angel. The two are sometime homosexual lovers. Then we encounter their “mad” boss Malito, drug-addled “Twisty” Bazan, sexual athlete “Crow” Mereles, and their “organizer” (Her)Nando Heguilen (who supervises contacts—for example, with colluding police who’ll share the take). The violent robbery itself (committed during a payroll transfer), the gang’s flight to Montevideo (en route to Paraguay), and the lengthy “siege” and bloodbath that ensue are quite vividly narrated, and also intriguingly punctuated by the testimony and thoughts of various witnesses, corrupt Buenos Aires police commissioner Silva, and such briefly though crucially involved characters as police wireless operator Roque Perez. Further levels of both interest and irony are added by the thieves’ insistence that they are honorable revolutionaries (“We’re Peronist activists, exiles, fighting for the General’s [i.e., exiled dictator Juan Peron’s] return”) and by the public outcry created when gang members trapped in a surrounded hotel defiantly burn their loot, showering the siege’s observers with flaming banknotes. And Piglia uses flashbacks with equal dexterity, illuminating his self-doomed protagonists’ twisted beginnings (the account of Dorda’s horrific childhood is particularly potent) and their subsequent paths to petty crime, prison, and their violent ends. Money to Burn inspired the recent prizewinning film Plata Quemada; in fact, it reads like an Argentinean Asphalt Jungle.
Latin American noir at its best—and further evidence of Piglia’s remarkable versatility and skill. - Kirkus Reviews


Ricardo Piglia's Money to Burn is a crime novel, right? Yes, but the events depicted happened in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1965. An account, then? With its mysticism and lyrical turn of phrase, and its stream of consciousness mixed with reportage, 'account' hardly seems a suitable label. Magical realism, possibly? In the style of Borges, but with more than a hint of Chandler at his best, of Runyon or Capote? Close, but what about the socio-political backdrop to the tragedy of this heist gone bad? It’s more a cleverly disguised polemic against the ambiguous positions capitalism forces us into on a daily basis than anything else. Capricious, see?
A gang of criminals raids a security van carrying approximately seven million pesos in Buenos Aires. They flee to Uruguay, where an Argentinean investigative team corners them. The siege of their hideout lasts 15 brutal hours and climaxes with the gang burning every note of the stolen money. So there you have it: the facts and the plot.
But, Piglia's faction, for want of a better term, isn't simply about reaching a safe conclusion. It's more a free-form study of how the events affected everyone involved in which the narrative slips between story-telling and reportage. One minute you are involved in the thought processes of one of the central characters; the next, listening to Piglia's narrator describing, in minute detail, the exterior of the besieged building, before the scene flows seamlessly into media reports, predominantly from El Mundo, although TV clips also feature heavily. The resultant - almost liquid - impressions could easily have become confused; in the hands of Piglia, however, they merge into something grippingly haphazard and yet beautiful. Imagine a heist film made by Richard Linklater and you'll have a fair idea of the nebulous reality concocted here.
The main theme that emerges from this confluence of narratives, is one dear to all students of history: how is the truth communicated, and whose version is eradicated from the record? It's not so much that Piglia comes at this problem head on, but rather that the analysis of the ‘truth’ arises from the multiple narrative voices. Witnesses’ accounts become twisted out of recognition in front of TV cameras, and participants’ assumed and/or researched impressions are regularly reworked to further blur fact and fiction.
One key scene that captures the complexity of communicating the ‘facts’, involves police surveillance specialist Roque Perez. Stuck in the bowels of the besieged building, he attempts to discern the gangsters' conversations via microphones connected to the heating system. "But the sound was either dead or muffled. And drowned in a confused sequence of signals coming from all over the building: a maddened and tortured multitude of groans and insults with which the imagination of Roque Perez (the wireless operator) struggled and failed. These were the screams of lost souls writhing in the agonies of hell, stray spirits locked inside the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno...”His loss of objectivity becomes pivotal.
Murderers, drug addicts, borderline psychopaths, yes; but the members of the gang are neither liars nor perverters of the truth - at least, not within the group. Despite their faults, they are bluntly honest and unlike the police officers (the heroes, upholders of the law, leaders of men), are acutely aware corruption is rife, and the escape from Argentina simply would not have happened had police and government officials not been guaranteed a cut. They burn the booty because if they surrender it to the authorities, it ends up back in the bank. By setting fire to it, they ensure that all the officials promised a bribe lose out, and will be forced into a chaotic aftermath of recriminations and investigations.
The baying public perceives the money as an innocent unwittingly caught up in the drama. Boundaries become fantastically blurred as arguments rage about the mental health of the gang; they must be criminally insane to do such an unthinkable thing and deserve care behind the walls of the sanatorium rather than death at the hands of the police. Media commentators, anecdotal evidence from bystanders channeled through TV and official statements from the police pull the narrative asunder, but one factor keeps the chaos in check and ensures the story's flow is never anything less than a torrent: Piglia's love of language and playing with words. Multiple and mixed perspectives are reined in and held within the perfectly crafted plot, and the dialogue of the central characters is poetic. "The police and the crooks [..] are alone in knowing how to make words come alive, so much so and so sharp they can split your soul apart like an egg breaking on the sharp edge of a frying pan,” says the young El Mundo reporter. Piglia graciously writes himself out of this appraisal, but his implicit inclusion in the text is a given by this point.
And while we're on the subject of language, let us also not forget Amanda Hopkinson’s skilful and sympathetic translation from the Spanish. Between the two of them, they make what could have been a tawdry and sordid account into something disturbingly otherworldly. This otherness is central to Piglia's book. All great crime fiction feeds off society's fascination for and repulsion with those who live beyond the law. In Money to Burn, the gang is a conduit between the acceptable reality of the overworld and the nihilistic drives of the underworld. Their actions rupture the membrane that binds the law-abiding majority and allows their anarchic universe to spill into ours.
The trick, which Piglia pulls off with aplomb, is to not let this chaos cloud his literary vision. There’s a crazed, confused and completely unwieldy story here, and yet he tells it without dumbing down, without selling the characters short, undermining the complexity of the events or giving the reader an easy ride. And when the ride is as adrenaline fuelled, brilliant and capricious as this, comfort deserves no real place within the equation. - Jonathan Bryant


Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn was billed as a novelistic account of a real-life robbery that took place in Argentina in the 1960s and the ensuing siege of the robbers’ hideout in Montevideo, Uruguay.  In summary, a group of four men - Malito, the Blonde Gaucho, Kid Brignone and Crow, together with various hangers-on and acquaintances come together to rob a payroll truck filled with millions of pesos.  Their getaway is disrupted when some policemen spot two of them changing the numberplates on the getaway car and, following their escape to Uruguay, three of them are tracked down to an apartment to which the police lay siege for 15 hours.  Eventually, the crooks burn the loot before the police finally manage to kill two of the gang and seriously injure the other.
There you have it - a seemingly straightforward crime thriller, if maybe a little spiced up by the fact that it is based on truth.  Nothing more to see here, let’s just move along.  Only that would be a big mistake because to describe it as I have done above is a little like describing Animal Farm as an everyday tale of farm animals or saying that The Hobbit is about someone going for a long walk.
Piglia uses the factual framework of the robbery and siege with witness statements, official reports and newspaper articles to create a near stream of consciousness that jumps from reportage to impressionism to a quasi-mysticism that comes out when he delves into the broken minds of the gang members and Gaucho and Kid Brignone in particular.  It moves at breakneck speed and in a kaleidoscope of imagery that gives it the feel of an adrenaline rush or a drug hit that meshes perfectly with the dependency that the robbers have on almost every kind of narcotic you can think of.
It’s particularly skilful the way that Piglia skates along the edge of chaos and confusion, highlighting the sense of confusion that always surrounds events like the robbery, without turning the narrative into a mess.  He jumps around in time and from viewpoint to viewpoint but manages to keep the central thread from getting lost.
He makes an interesting motif of the seeming randomness and casualness of the low-lifes and the flotsam and jetsam of society - prostitutes, washed up singers, shady crooks with links to political extremists - who get caught up in the heist and suffer its consequences.  For example, the teenage girlfriend of Crow Mereles ends up being tortured for information by the police and Fontan Reyes, the failed singer, is murdered for his minor involvement.
But, in a sense, Gaucho, Kid, Crow and the rest are as much the heroes of the piece as the villains.  Despite their nihilistic violence and their sexual transgressions - rape, under-age sex and prostitution pervade the book - there is a fundamental honesty about their relationships with each other and a clarity of outlook on life that Piglia compares almost favourably with the police and the authorities.  These are, for the most part, corrupt, immoral and petty creatures who could even be said to be facilitators of the events through taking bribes and pay-offs from the gang.
And here Crow, Gaucho and Kid get their revenge by burning the loot and thereby both denying their conspirators their pay-offs and share of the booty and, in an environment where money is scarce, they deliver the ultimate two-fingered salute to the society from which they are outcast.  Not even their most gruesome acts can prevent the reader from a bit of grudging admiration for their defiance, even as the mob of spectators outside the besieged apartment try to lynch Kid Brignone as, grievously wounded, he is carried from the building at the end of the affair.
In amongst all this, Piglia explores the circumstances and events that have made Kid Brignone and the Blonde Gaucho into the damaged creatures we see and it is here that the writing becomes almost mystical as we get to read the thoughts and memories of the pair and gradually to recognise the strange but genuine love the two have for each other which, although consummated sexually, is more an emotional love.
This is meaty fare and not for the delicate or faint-hearted.  It is, however, loud, brilliant, thought-provoking and guaranteed to give a rush.  I don;t think this is nearly as well known as it deserves to be or as it would, I suspect, be if the author had been British or American.  If you do read it, don't top before the epilogue as there is a cool anecdote about how Piglia came to write it.  And, as a final note, it is wonderfully translated by Amanda Hopkinson who , despite a couple of clunky Anglo-Saxon slang words, manages to preserve the spirit and voice of the author. - 2606books.blogspot.com/2013/01/2469-1001-book-challenge-money-to-burn.html


Ricardo Piglia dominates Argentine writing. Born in 1941, he inherited Borges' suspicion of genre, his exploration of writing and reading - and his attraction to the seamy underbelly of Buenos Aires. Piglia's fictions are parables of creativity within the nightmare of his country's recent history. He offers brilliant off-the-cuff comments, has a vast knowledge of crime thrillers, and has re-jigged the Argentine literary tradition as urban and anarchic.
Yet his output is meagre and experimental. So it came as a surprise when he published this prize-winning recreation of the hold-up of a security van in Buenos Aires and a 15-hour shoot-out in Montevideo. Here was a thriller that had sprung from Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard, with respect for the locale, for the way his thugs talk, their weapons, their pasts.
Piglia combed police records, the press, psychiatric reports and witness statements. As in Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a journalist chronicles events that escape from hindsight. Renzi, this journalist, reappears from Piglia's earlier work and is insulted by the commissioner in charge of the case as a know-all, lacking respect, with his glasses and goose face - a mocking self-portrait of the writer.
The story follows a gang of cold-blooded killers, two of whom are called "the twins" as they are gay lovers. They almost get away with their booty, but trip up and shoot to the death in a flat in Montevideo.
These thugs imitate Hollywood films and childishly watch themselves on the news. However, Piglia is up to more than the clever weaving of a true-crime story. His epigraph is from Brecht: what's worse, to rob a bank, or to found one?
According to him, Buenos Aires lacks urban myths. The gauchos have become thugs who kill from stolen cars. His main character, the "Blond Gaucho" Dorda, is a secret hero, who burns the money snatched from the van. He is society's scapegoat, the idiot who suffers for others in an Argentine version of a Greek tragedy.
Given Argentine history, parallels can be drawn with the urban guerillas who raided banks and were decimated by the police and military in orgies of violence. Despite these reverberations, I found the novel sentimentalises these thugs. Amanda Hopkinson's translation deals well with Piglia's studied slang, and has useful notes. - Jason Wilson
*****I recommend you see the movie, Burnt Money, before reading this book/review.*****
At the end of Burnt Money I didn’t want to let go of Angel & Nene, those beautiful Argentinian bank robbers known as the Twins.  Forever frozen in an image of true love that proves the lie gay men don’t commit like straights.
I got a copy of the original novel.  In translation, as I don’t know Spanish.  Having seen a couple of dreadful book-to-movie adaptations recently (Testosterone and Frisk) I was wary.  Well, this one has been faithfully, but not slavishly, transferred from page to big screen.  But if you need to choose, definitely go for the film which is way ahead in emotional impact and homoerotic intensity.  There’s just no comparison.  See the movie, then read the book for background.  I got most from details of Angel & Nene’s lives before we meet them. 
Here, Angel is Dorda, known as the Blond Gaucho.  Nene is Brignone, called the Kid.  Well, Angel as blond is just not possible.  He’s dark and sultry, Eduardo Noriega, the gorgeous Spaniard.  And Leonardo Sbaraglia isn’t diseased, thin and fragile, though he is pale and sexily good-looking, like the Kid.
Whereas the movie tells its powerful story with linear progression, the novel flits about in time and place, varying POV.  It shows how Dorda and Brigone became the Gaucho and the Kid, and got caught in true-life events that took place in Buenos Aires and Montevideo between September and November 1965: a robbery gone wrong then the dramatic siege that made the protagonists legendary. 
Action scenes use immediate present tense, to effect.  Though the narrative takes a detached documentary approach.  Yes, Dorda and Brigone are lovers, but their simmering sexuality and ache of yearning that makes the movie so special is diluted.  Maybe that makes it palatable to mainstream (i.e. straightcentric) readership.  Whereas the film’s focus means nothing distracts from its charismatic leads and one of the most incredible love stories I’ve ever seen.
There’s a Wild West ethos, lawless and lethal, appropriate to the material with those names, Gaucho and Kid.  The robbery has a small part at the beginning of the movie, then action shifts to the hideout in Montevideo for a claustrophobic and increasingly tense period of waiting for the inevitable showdown with the authorities.  The book takes longer to get to Uruguay, explaining how the heist is set up, the motivations of individual gang members, etc.  However, the basic story  is the same.
Angel/Dardo and Nene/Brigone are lovers in a macho Argentinian culture that despises faggots as womanly and weak.  Yet they make themselves heroes.  There’s an important difference.  Burning the stolen money is a declaration in book and film.  But the film, by emphasising the homoerotic relationship between Angel and Nene, makes it a symbolic gesture against a deeply homophobic society that has repressed them. Their love is redemptive and by destroying the money, in effect they’re saying Fuck you! to those who deny that love.  Some have called the film homophobic because it portrays gay men as psychopaths, murderers, and thieves who can only survive by consuming copious quantities of drugs.  That misses the point: Angel and Nene have been damaged by a society that rejects them, turned them into drugged-out outlaws.  The book, however, makes it political more than personal, defiance against a corrupt regime that criminalises misfits like Dorda and Brigone.
Ricardio Piglia based his novel on original source material, including interviews, interrogation transcripts, surveillance records and psychiatric reports, authentic true-life crime.  It is particularly strong accounting the explosive 15-hour siege involving over 300 police.  But the film is unbeatable, a soaring romantic epic, with lover-heroes confronting and resisting insurmountable odds on their path to destiny.   I won’t return to the novel, but I’ve already watched the movie 3 times.  Though I’d watch Eduardo Noriega read the telephone directory so maybe I’m a tad biased. - www.squashduck.com/ltd/reviews/moneytoburn.htm


Formas Breves = Short Forms


Ricardo Piglia, Formas Breves = Short Forms, Editorial Anagrama, 2001.

Argentine writer Piglia is the most perceptive contemporary reader of that nation's literature and perhaps its best practitioner. This diary of short essays is of particular interest, as it doubles as the author's first rough attempt at an autobiography. Here Piglia pays homage to his favorite authors and scans their styles so skillfully that one would think the authors had barcoded their works specifically for him. Like Borges, Piglia goes from reading to emotion, and from emotion to poetry, so that his critical analysis provokes an unexpectedly heartfelt reaction, an effect that is heightened by the book's conversational tone. Piglia also includes transcriptions of actual conversations he's had around crowded caf tables, where he and his friends discuss authors' feats and flaws in the same way that other Latin Americans debate the triumphs and failures of lovers, soccer players, and politicians. For many readers, these transciptions may prove the most pleasurable part of the book. But as a whole this is really an extended conversation. It is as if Piglia had invited us to pull one more chair around the table, participate in his modern symposium, and appreciate his many real and imagined friends. Strongly recommended for all libraries and bookstores. Silvia Gil de Cwilich - Publishers Weekly




Roy Ketchum: Reading from the Periphery: Ricardo Piglia andthe Liberal Arts (pdf)


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Ricardo Piglia, Target in the Night, Trans. by Sergio Waisman, Deep Vellum, 2015. 


“A passionate thriller in which the madness of the detective, a retired police captain, is integral to his solving mysteries. An intense and tragic family history, with echoes of King Lear, set in a small town in the Argentinean Pampas. The return of Emilio Renzi, one of the greatest characters in recent Argentinean literature, who in his maturity recalls, with a certain skeptical nostalgia, his past adventures. A profound reflection on power and justice. An exceptional novel.”


Every once in a while you need to spend some time in the nuthouse, or in jail, to understand what this country is all about.
Ricardo Piglia’s  Target in the Night takes place in a small rural town in Argentina about 1972, toward the end of the long exile of Juan Perón. Target in the Night is a tale of betrayal and corruption, written loosely in the form of a police procedural. Here’s the obligatory summary of the plot: A mysterious American of Puerto Rican heritage moves into town at the invitation of the two daughters of the town’s richest industrialist. When the American is murdered in his hotel room and a rumored $100,000 seems to have gone missing, witnesses point to the night porter, Yoshio Dazai, an Argentine of Japanese descent. (Piglia loves to remind the reader that Argentina is a nation of immigrants.) Police Inspector Croce is skeptical, though he has no choice but to arrest the hapless Dazai. Croce ultimately becomes convinced of Dazai’s innocence but is out-maneuvered by the Chief Prosecutor, a devious man by the name of Cueto, who forces Croce into retirement.  Emilio Renzi, a reporter who has arrived from Buenos Aires to cover the story, begins to collaborate with Croce to solve the mystery.
Croce is a wonderful character who “loved everyone like a son” – because, the narrator quickly adds, “he didn’t really know what that feeling was like.” He’s an eccentric, intuitive detective who “sees things that others didn’t” and continues the lineage of Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
Fortunately for the reader, this is not really a police procedural but a richly nuanced and sometimes adventurous novel. Piglia’s novel roams through discussion on philosophy, the Jungian analysis of dreams, and the nature of freedom, but hardly a page goes by without some subtle commentary or analysis of the recent history of Argentina, where “there are no values left, only prices.” In Piglia’s Argentina, corruption has twisted the rules of the game so that only the innocent and the idealists are doomed. As Inspector Croce says: “If you find a clean hundred thousand dollars and you don’t take it…they know you can’t be trusted.”
Much of the pleasure of reading Piglia’s novel arises from the curious nature of his bemused and generally omniscient narrator, who tells the story from a distance. The narration takes place at least a decade after the events of the murder and is accompanied by occasional footnotes showing that our meticulous narrator can easily turn pedantic. (There are hints scattered throughout the book suggesting that the journalist Renzi – who appears in other works by Piglia – just might be the narrator.) At times, the narrator seems to hover over the town like a drone, looking down on the movements of participants and listening to the swirl of rumors that comprise daily life.
In that town, like in all the towns of the Province of Buenos Aires, more news was batted around in a single day than in  any large city in a week. The difference between regional and national news was so vast that the residents could retain the illusion that they lived an interesting life.
In the end, the mystery of who killed Tony Durán is only partly solved. As he prepares to head back to Buenos Aires, the journalist Renzi contemplates the inconclusiveness of the investigation.
Someone should invent a new detective genre, paranoid fiction it could be called. Everyone is a suspect, everyone feels pursued. Instead of being an isolated individual, the criminal is a group with absolute power. No one understands what’s happening, the clues and the testimonies contradict each other as if they changed with each interpretation, and all suspicions are kept open. The victim is the protagonist and the center of the intrigue, instead of the detective hired to solve the case or the murderer hired to kill.
Target in the Night is perhaps less ambitious than Piglia’s earlier novel Artificial Respiration, which I wrote about recently, but it’s more accessible, especially for non-Argentinian readers. - sebald.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-paranoid-fiction-of-ricardo-piglia/


Image result for The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years
Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, Trans. by Robert Croll, Restless Books, 2017.
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Introduction, by Ilan Stavans

“Cognizant of his impending death, Piglia, the Argentine titan of letters who died of A.L.S. in January, prepared his 327 notebooks for publication in a trilogy…. Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to “Emilio Renzi”: a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Piglia’s prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life.”
The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice


This volume is the momentous first installment of the Argentine novelist’s 327 diaries, written as the autobiography of his alter-ego, Emilio Renzi. The source material chronicles Piglia’s attempts, as he was coming of age in the ’60s, to answer the question, “How does one become a writer?” Renzi first encounters literature at 16, when he reads Sartre to impress a girl. From then on, love and writing are forever intertwined: his story wins a prize at the same time he’s embarking on an affair, and, later, a woman in Buenos Aires prompts him to abandon his studies at university and move in with her so he can focus on writing exclusively. After they break up, he wonders, “What was the point of the three long years I spent with her? Loving her. Finishing a book.” Of the difficult times every young writer suffers, he writes, “These dark days will seem luminous when distance allows me to observe them as though they were landscapes.” As he draws closer to publishing his debut, the incidentals of this personal history fade in favor of literary insights. Borges is labeled “a marvelous literature-making machine” and Marquez criticized for being too “professionally” Latin American. In this fictionalized autobiography, Piglia’s ability to succinctly criticize and contextualize major writers from Kafka to Flannery O’Connor is astounding, and the scattering of those insights throughout this diary are a joy to read. This book is essential reading for writers. - Publishers Weekly


 The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years is the first in a trilogy of fictionalized diaries Ricardo Piglia crafted in his dying years, based on the diaries he had been keeping since 1957 (327 volumes in all). Piglia invents an alter ego, Emilio Renzi, as a stand-in, a way of looking back on his own life and the detailed record of it that nevertheless gives him some distance from it, and more freedom in re-writing and (re)considering it.
       The diary even cleverly begins in what seems to be the first person but turns out to be the third, giving a nice sense of where the reader stands, never able to be quite certain about the protagonist-narrator:
Ever since I was a boy, I've repeated what I don't understand, laughed Emilio Renzi that afternoon
       While most of the narrative -- much in the form of more or less traditional diary-form entries -- is in the more direct and personal first person -- Piglia as Renzi -- Piglia remains aware, and reminds readers, that: "Exorcism, narcissism: in an autobiography, the I is all spectacle". By making the 'I' an other -- Renzi -- and even then also stepping away from it at certain points in the work, Piglia tries to avoid getting caught up entirely in self -- futilely, of course -- The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years is entirely personal -- yet at least struggling with and pointing to this futility. Yet capturing the self, even with these contortions, I competing with I, remains challenging: well into his efforts, he admits:
I am worried about my tendency to speak about myself as though I were divided, were two people.
       Near the end of this volume, Piglia describes his efforts (at that time) at: "creating a new version of the concept of autobiography" -- even as the here-resulting Renzi-version, based on what presumably are fairly conventional diary-entries, would/did only take shape almost half a century later. Yet this idea -- of how to write a life, especially one's own -- obviously is of interest to him from near the beginning. Unsurprisingly, other diaries also feature prominently here, and were obviously influential: Cesare Pavese's This Business of Living, in particular -- about which, among other things, double-playing Renzi/Piglia notes:
Pavese often splits into two, speaks of himself in the second person. He plays with the double: the text is a mirror, and in it there is an attempt to persuade the "other."
       Among the other projects that he discusses repeatedly is helping his grandfather get his papers in order: in part a generous subsidy for the young Renzi, the grandfather also genuinely seems to be worried about losing his memory -- his hold on the past -- and wants to get his papers in order -- much as, more than fifty years later, Piglia tries to (re)capture and shape his own past in the short amount of time he knew he had remaining with The Diaries of Emilio Renzi.
       While most of this volume, covering the years 1957 to 1967 (after an introductory childhood overview), is in traditional diary form, there are also in-between chapters that are more conventional narratives, personal stories and essays that go on at greater length (compared to the rapid-fire short diary entries). Late in the volume, Piglia/Renzi suggests:
We can't live if we don't pause from time to time to make a narrative and tangential summary of our lives
       While engaged in a continuing narrative-summary -- the diary itself -- the interspersed chapters are such steps back, or to the side -- of the moment and time, but also allowing a different sort of reflection than the in-the-moment diary jottings do.
       A beautiful opening chapter describes Renzi's earliest years, and first engagements with books -- suddenly finding literature when he was sixteen, when a girl asked to borrow a copy of Camus' The Plague (which he neither had, nor had read, but immediately bought and wolfed down). From then on, he was devoted to literature -- and suggests: "I can reconstruct my life based on the shelves in my library". But The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years is not a bibliographic memoir: his reading is significant, but only part of it.
       Still, part of the fun of the volume is in his reactions to literature of his time, especially the contemporary authors and works discovered along the way. Half a century later, many authors advanced beyond what Renzi then had access to: a young Fuentes, a Vargas Llosa who: "ruins his novels through excessive 'intelligence' in the structural tricks" (okay, not everything changed all that much ...), and then his sitting down with Gabriel García Márquez's just-published One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are also encounters with many of authors of the time, including Borges, and the volume offers an interesting glimpse of the Argentine literary scene of those days.
       With the diaries here covering Renzi/Piglia's life from age seventeen to twenty-seven or so, Formative Years follows the Bildungsroman trail. Immersed in literature -- after the halting beginning -- he is, throughout, an avid reader and writer. Amusingly:
I learn what I want to do from imaginary writers, Stephen Dedalus or Nick Adams, for example. I read their lives as a way to understand what it is all about. I am not interested in inspiring myself with the "real" writers.
       He becomes a writer -- and comes to convince himself:
I have to understand that only my literature matters, and that I must set aside and abandon whatever opposes it (in my mind or in my imagination), s I have always done since the beginning. That is my only moral lesson. The rest belongs to a world that is not mine. I am a man who has gambled his life on a single hand. 
       While somewhat politically active, and certainly politically aware, Renzi/Piglia's focus remains on the literary. That includes, however, a frustration with the limited role of the writer, as he notes also
At the moment, a writer in Argentina is a harmless individual. We write our books, publish them. We are left to live, we have our circles, our audience.  
       In part a reflection of those times -- politically unrestful, but more at a low simmer -- Renzi/Piglia is also much more focused on personal struggles and development -- increasingly so, it almost seems, as the political situation grow more ominous.
       There is detailed engagement with how and what he wants to write, the uncertainty about which approaches to take as he fascinatingly describes his early works in progress. Fiction -- fictionalization -- dominates, even if he is uncertain of the exact form to embrace. And he goes so far as to suggest:
I always knew the best way to live life was to invent a character and to live according to him. If you have chosen well, there is a response ready for every situation.
       The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years is a partial memoir. Partial in only being the first of three volumes, and only covering up to Renzi/Piglia at age twenty-seven, but also in its selective presentation. Much surrounding him remains in the background -- notably family: the grandfather is the person he is most engaged with, and his parents are mentioned, but there's little space devoted to them; there's rather little background leading, for example, to the very strong statement:
Sometimes I think I should publish this book under a different name, thus sever all ties with my father, against whom, in fact, I wrote this book and will write the ones to follow. Setting aside his last name would be the most eloquent proof of my distance and my resentment.
       Certainly, there could have been more explaining this -- but Renzi/Piglia's introspection is selective, and/or carefully curated.
       He sums up at one point:
Politics, literature, and toxic love affairs with other men's wives have been the only truly persistent things in my life. 
       The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years does present all three -- though among the love affairs are at least a few that don't involve other men's wives -- but literature certainly dominates (along with all the incidentals, including the accompanying money-worries), and it makes for an appealing journey with a writer as he comes into (literary) being. The variety, of the longer chapters between diary entries, also makes for a welcome change of pace to the narrative -- and some of these are truly beautifully written.
       A convincing look at an author's formative years, it will be interesting to see where Renzi/Piglia takes it from here (and what he returns to) in the two following volumes. - M. A. Orthofer  http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/argentina/pigliaER1.htm


"Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to "Emilio Renzi" (.....) No previous familiarity with Piglia’s work is needed to appreciate these bibliophilic diaries, adroitly repurposed through a dexterous game of representation and masks that speaks volumes of the role of the artist in society, the artist in his time, the artist in his tradition (and perched just on the border of that tradition, peering in à la Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window)." - Mara Faye Lethem,




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