Ricardo Piglia

Ricardo Piglia argued that Argentine literature runs through Roberto Arlt rather than through Borges, and wrote novels to prove it. His family left Adrogué for Mar del Plata when he was sixteen because of the politics of the time, and he began the diary that he kept for more than fifty years and published at the end of his life as the notebooks of Emilio Renzi - his own name given to a character. He worked as an editor and taught for two decades at Princeton. Respiración artificial, published in 1980 under the dictatorship, is a novel about a man researching an ancestor and a correspondence that cannot be completed, and it is about the disappeared without once naming them - which is what made it publishable and what makes it unbearable to read afterwards. The critical argument is inseparable from the fiction. He read Argentine writing as a quarrel between two lines: the polished European inheritance and the immigrant, badly-spelled, criminal-adjacent one that Arlt wrote in, and he insisted the second was the living tradition. He wrote detective novels seriously and taught crime fiction as literature when that was still unusual. Blanco nocturno won major prizes in 2010. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2014 and went on working with eye-tracking software until he could not, publishing three volumes of the diaries before he died in 2017. The diaries are the strangest thing he did. He kept them from 1957, reread them for decades, and then published them not as a document but as a novel narrated by his invented double - so that fifty years of a real life arrive as fiction, which is the argument his criticism had been making all along.

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