it May be that, as I believed Borges, it is more civilized to read than to write. If this were true, Ricardo Piglia will have been the writer more civilized this time. In addition to his short stories, his novels and his essays, Piglia left us with a certainty: that literature was to discuss the literature and therefore, at the same time and inseparably, to exercise criticism. Criticism and fiction, so called one of his books, crucial -that includes the insoslayables “Theses on the short story”- and that title is a possible definition of all poetry. Not for nothing is his friend, the musician Gerardo Gandini, who made the opera The city absent, on the basis of his novel of the same name, insisted on giving her students this book as the only manual of composition. Without going more far, artificial Respiration, his first novel, from 1980, is by the same a fiction and a critical reading of radical literature. Is more, it could be said t hat its influence was decisive above all for the way in which he proposed a re-reading highly original literature of argentina, a reordering of your canon in which Borges was “the best writer of the NINETEENTH century”, and in which he gave a central position to Roberto Arlt and the Polish Witold Gombrowicz. It was the largest reader (the last?) because he realized, in the road right of Borges, that the fiction does not only depend on who builds it but who reads it.
Yesterday afternoon, Piglia died of a cardiac arrest at his home in Palermo, after traversing, with huge clarity and heroism amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that punished him since the beginning of 2014. A little ironically, said that he had always asked for time to write, and by that time it had been given under the form of a disease that forced him to an activity indoors. Piglia took advantage of that time (how not to think in the short story “The secret miracle,” Borges?) and the enforced confinement served him to complete some collections (The three avant-garde. Saer, Puig, Walsh and The initial), but especially to review their daily, ended up attributing to the name of Emilio Renzi, his character, always.
In this last time came also the prizes, first of all, the Formentor, which had also received two writers that he admired without extenuating: Borges and Beckett. Was Charlotte Pedersen, granddaughter of Marta Eguía -your partner-you, the one that received the recognition along with his friend, the Spanish publisher Jorge Herralde.
More notes to understand this topic
Library essential
The one that taught us to read
Life and fiction
Piglia was born in Adrogué, November 24, 1940. He studied history at The Silver, but was soon requested by other frames. The reading of the high modernism (Kafka, Joyce) went to american literature and to the police hard, which helped spread in the 70′s with the collection Black Series.
The books of Piglia were leaving between major lapses (I tended to space out a lot of their publications) and the occurrences, with a little over two years apart, the novels White night (2010) and the way (2013) were an exception. Will be influenced by this singularity the end of his commitments at Princeton University, where he taught classes for fifteen years and retired in 2010. Piglia, the man was reluctant, had occupied all of a sudden the center of the canon. In the literature post-borgeana, your name is in the canon to the side of Juan José Saer (his friend, who dedicated to him inquiry), César Aira, and Fogwill. Each one will have their preferences, but the place is already indisputable.
in The same way that in his stories, Piglia diluted the boundaries between fiction and criticism, The diaries of Emilio Renzi, which came out up to now two volumes of the three expected, blurs the boundaries between fiction and life.
When published false Name, in 1975, Piglia included a preliminary note in which he said the following about the unity of the stories from nigeria: “I Wrote the stories in this book (except one) in 1975. At that time I lived in an apartment on Sarmiento street, opposite the old market of Montevideo, and when I think of these stories I remember a window that overlooked a courtyard. I guess that the fact to have written by looking at each of both the light from that window gives me a certain drive: as if the stories had been there, the other side of the glass”. And in an entry from his journal, 1969, reads as follows: “I Also don’t like the affected styles that circulate in the narrative of my generation: all write with the voice of another (especially that of Borges, Onetti and Cortázar); by my side, despite everything, a voice that will not be necessarily mine, that is to say, the one I use in life. Write with the sincerity of a subject that I don 217;t know and that just appears -or overlooks – when I write”. This was clear in an annotation of 1965: “The invasion has nothing to do with Borges. Anything with Cortázar, the other pest. Thematically the influence is Arlt, too many delaciones”. Hence the “Homage to Roberto Arlt” false Name there are no more than a step.
Piglia also wrote with the voice of another, but of another that he himself invented. I knew to upset the powers in the same way that could freak out the syntax.
One of the theories that are most strong Piglia was the “two stories”; that is to say that, like Borges, we read a thing and, in the end, it turns out that the story that we read was different, lit from the end. The same goes with your life. He also made her life a fiction is twofold: that we knew and that he had. It is irrelevant to separate one from the other because, like in the tales, are one and indivisible.
The lesson of the master
No one spoke better than Piglia. Their classes, when transliterated, gave a clean text, without hesitation or redundancy. The talk took for him the form of a thought that was going to unfold in a loud voice. He knows that anyone who has heard any of those classes, which also made public with the lectures on Borges, which was aired on television.
it Was a aforista acute (“Madame Bovary he would have liked to read Madame Bovary“; “Telling it is like playing poker: the secret is to seem a liar when he tells the truth”) and, in the private chat, I had the same generosity of the classes: participated their highlights as if they were the partner. These illuminations had a core recurrent: the reflection. Or, to put it another way, that at this point of the story can’t have wonder without knowledge.
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