praise for
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi
“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. Amid meeting redheads at bars, he dissects styles and structures with a surgeon’s precision, turning his gaze on a range of writers, from Plato to Dashiell Hammett, returning time and again to Pavese, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Arlt and Borges.… This is an embarrassment of riches… 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.”
Mara Faye Lethem,
New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia’s final project, a fictional journal in three volumes, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi—Renzi being Piglia’s fictional alter ego. And now here at last is the first volume in English, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll. It’s something to be celebrated… [It] offer[s] one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style.”
Adam Thirlwell, BookForum, The Best Books of 2017
“A valediction from the noted Argentine writer, known for bringing the conventions of hard-boiled U.S. crime drama into Latin American literature… Fans of Cortázar, Donoso, and Gabriel García Márquez will find these to be eminently worthy last words from Piglia.”
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“When young Ricardo Piglia wrote the first pages of his diaries, which he would work on until the last years of his life, did he have any inkling that they would become a lesson in literary genius and the culmination of one of the greatest works of Argentine literature?”
Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream
“Ricardo Piglia, who passed away earlier this year at age seventy-five, is celebrated as one of the giants of Argentine literature, a rightful heir to legends like Borges, Cortázar, Juan Jose Saer, and Roberto Arlt. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is his life’s work.… An American equivalent might be if Philip Roth now began publishing a massive, multi-volume autobiography in the guise of Nathan Zuckerman.… It is truly a great work.… This is a fantastic, very rewarding read—it seems that Piglia has found a form that can admit everything he has to say about his life, and it is a true pleasure to take it in.”
Veronica Esposito, BOMB Magazine
“The Diaries of Emilio Renzi continue to be a fascinating literary-autobiographical experiment… and, especially, a wonderful immersion in literature itself. Of particular interest in showing the transition of Latin American (and specifically Argentine) literature—no longer: ‘out of sync, behind, out of place’—, Piglia’s range extends far beyond that too. Yes, most of this is presumably mainly of interest to the similarly literature-obsessed—but Piglia makes it hard to imagine who wouldn’t be.”
M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review
“Much like Susan Sontag… my first introduction to Piglia is through his diaries. And what a privilege to be in someone’s head even for a bit, to know what troubled or delighted them as they made their way into the world. That no matter how esteemed or revered they are in the public spotlight, they deal with the same problems most of us do: figuring out how to make rent, finding enough time to write, loss, heartbreak.”
Pia Cortez, Book Look
Also by Ricardo Piglia
Artificial Respiration
The Absent City
Money to Burn
Target in the Night
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life
Contents
I • The Accident
II • The Russian Neighbor
III • In the Name of Conrad
IV • Hands in the Fire
Epilogue
To Germán García
for the way back
Infinite these riches abandoned.
Edgar Bayley
I The Accident
Chapter One
1
In those days I lived several lives, shifting between autonomous sequences: a series of friends, another of love, of alcohol, of politics, of dogs, of bars, of nocturnal wanderings. I wrote screenplays that were never produced, translated numerous crime novels that always seemed the same, and compiled dry books on philosophy (or psychoanalysis!) that were published under other writers’ names. I was lost, disconnected, until finally—by chance, suddenly, unexpectedly—I ended up teaching in the United States, involved in an incident that I want to put on the record.
I’d received an offer to spend a semester as a visiting professor at the elite and exclusive Taylor University; they’d had an unsuccessful candidate and thought of me because they knew me from before, and so they wrote to me, we moved forward, set a date, but then I started going back and forth, putting it off: I didn’t want to spend six months confined to a wasteland. One day, in mid-December, I received a message from Ida Brown, written with the syntax of an urgent telegram from the old days: All ready. Send syllabus. We await your arrival. It was very hot that night, so I took a shower, got a beer from the fridge, and sat down in my canvas
