Don Ricardo Piglia he was the cultivated writer par excellence. An author who entered the novel with the residue of maturity and collection and the baggage of everything read. Under the combination of his middle name and his middle name he generated his undoubted alter ego Emilio Renzi, a writer faced with a multitude of creative vicissitudes, including political and essentially vital ones, on which Piglia turns at times even with sought-after indifference to the plot. Because Piglia is an author of characters, of dialogues, of scenarios that stand out above any other narrative intention.
So looking for the writer in Piglia who tells us a more or less living story, with the usual dynamism of a conventional plot, can lead to disappointment.
Reading Piglia is getting ready to taste another type of literature between avant-garde and essential. How fundamental is it to know the protagonists of any story? What is relevant in what is narrated beyond the characters appearing in various scenarios about existence, creation, art, philosophy, desires and dreams, history, longings...? Humanity at the end of the day turned into literature. And with that Piglia is enough and more than enough to write fascinating books.
After a first stage immersed in the universe of the story or the short novel, with various evocations of the entire plethora of authors devoured by the great reader, Piglia assaulted the narrative in large format with her novel Artificial Respiration in which Renzi assumes those commands of the author transmuted to paper.
But beyond this personalization of the author in the plot, Piglia also offers us high-flying crime novels, impregnated with that other, even pedagogical intention of his prose made metaliterature as well as brilliant essays on literature in response to the darkness of existence made maximum reality in its final blindness.
So approaching Piglia is one of those transcendent literary experiences that require a previous reading base but that in its depth opens paths to new young authors like the Argentinian one. Samantha Schweblin.
Top 3 recommended books by Ricardo Piglia
The diaries of Emilio Renzi
The disappearance of a recognized author usually brings with it reissues and volumes that bring the work of the disappeared genius closer to every reader. AND this is one of the most successful cases.
Because this volume guides us towards that literary duality, between magic and mystical, that Ricardo Piglia and Emilio Renzi suppose. Both writers, authors, protagonists ... a confusion of roles that offers that very rich universe of creation, of the details that make the writer chronicler of what has been lived with an intention of eternity; with a testimonial will of the essentially human above the times.
Few "alter ego" reach the level of commitment of the author with his work. Emilio is Ricardo and goes through the stories of his bibliography with greater or lesser weight, in cameos or essential roles. Thus the work becomes life and life works. Vitalism that jumps from one side of the mirror of the creator to the other.
Composed of «Years of formation», «The happy years» and «A day in the life», the simple degree already gives off that sensation of compendium that underpins everything, of the will to expose oneself with the sometimes too blinding brightness of the most intimate truth.
Artificial respiration
And we come to the most valued work and the first of the author's novels. It was the year 1980 and Piglia was around those forty years in which, on more than one occasion, I have heard that the ideal age for every writer has arrived.
Something like a half of the way in which you have enough vital baggage and in which concerns are precipitated by the discovery of the recent tinsel that once looked like gold in youth.
The point is that the novel is also an initiatory reading towards Piglia himself. In this debut film, the Emilio Renzi in charge of transmitting Piglia's world already emerges.
And it surprises, above all, despite the clear temporal, physical and historical location of the plot, the ability to transform the detail into a universal example.
Emilio is a young writer who is composing between letters the history of an Argentina that ends up being written on a sketch of what should never have been, a script drawn up by the stroke of the most evil wills that could only lead to a reality as gray as the that the author had to live through in those late 70s.
Burnt silver
And Piglia also knows how to write exciting stories like this one in which he explores the limits of morality, the extent of corruption, the insane tendency of the most evil to take over the highest echelons of power... And yet... everything so sinisterly human .
The perverse side enhanced by greed and its ambitions is capable of leading human beings towards the justification of their violence. A van is robbed by some thieves and from that moment
Piglia leads us through that sum of wills capable of violating power, of killing. Except that the plans between characters capable of anything go awry and in their bloody trail of escape they will end up facing that back-and-forth boomerang that excessive ambition can be.
