The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years

A giant of contemporary Latin American literature, Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia was known for stories, novels, operas, screenplays, and essays, but his magnum opus is one that he poured into 327 secret notebooks over nearly six decades, in which he imagined himself as his literary alter ego, Emilio Renzi. Like Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, Renzi stars in many of his creator’s works, but Piglia invented him in 1957, long before his 1981 novel about Argentina’s Dirty War, Artificial Respiration, made Renzi, and Piglia, famous. In the novels, Renzi is a detective; in the notebooks that comprise The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, he is something more complex-a multilayered reconstruction of the self that the reader, performing her own detective work, teases out over these intricate, illuminating pages.

As Piglia develops as a reader and writer, falls in love, and tussles with his tyrannical father, we get eye-opening perspectives on Latin America’s tumultuous twentieth century. Obsessed with the literary giants-from Borges to Cortázar (both of whom he knew), Proust to Hemingway, Kafka to Camus-The Diaries comprise a celebration of reading as a vital, existential activity.

In 2011, when Piglia learned he had a fatal illness, he raced to complete his mysterious masterwork as rumors about the book intensified among his many fans. First released in Spanish as a trilogy amid tremendous applause, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi cements Piglia’s place in the global canon.