The Absent City

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When Duke published Piglia’s first novel, Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration) in 1994, it brought to an English-speaking audience, in a translation by Daniel Balderston, one of the most important Latin American novels from the 1980s, and perhaps the most important one from the “dirty war” period in Argentina. Artificial Respiration contains many levels of ironies and double entendres, of mystery and displacements. The narrator, Renzi (a character who appears in much of Piglia’s work), is searching for his uncle, who has vanished, and the search leads to a series of revealing conversations about history, exile, and literature. Written at a time when Argentina was living through the most repressive military dictatorship in its history, when thousands of citizens were “disappeared” by the government (facts not explicitly mentioned in the novel), Artificial Respiration displaces the focus and discusses Argentina’s nineteenth-century political turmoil, including Rosas’s dictatorship in the first half of that century. At a time of active censorship by the military regime, the novel has a character who is a censor trying to decipher supposedly coded letters and messages.

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