"For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia's final project, a fictional journal in three volumes,
Los diarios de Emilio Renzi--Renzi being Piglia's fictional alter ego. And now here at last is the first volume in English,
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll. It's something to be celebrated... [It] offer[s] one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style."
--Adam Thirlwell, BookForum, The Best Books of 2017"[A] masterpiece.... everything written by Ricardo Piglia, which we read as intellectual fabrications and narrated theories, was partially or entirely lived by Emilio Renzi. The visible, cerebral chronicles hid a secret history that was flesh and bones."
--New York Times"When young Ricardo Piglia wrote the first pages of his diaries, which he would work on until the last years of his life, did he have any inkling that they would become a lesson in literary genius and the culmination of one of the greatest works of Argentine literature?"
--Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream"In this fictionalized autobiography, Piglia's ability to succinctly criticize and contextualize major writers from Kafka to Flannery O'Connor is astounding, and the scattering of those insights throughout this diary are a joy to read. This book is essential reading for writers."
--Publishers Weekly"
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is a rare glimpse into the heart of twentieth-century Latin American literature, with the inimitable Ricardo Piglia as tour guide. More than just a traditional diary,
Renzi is an illuminating voyage into the hearts of books and writers and history. An inspiring work and an important achievement."
--Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)"The great Argentine writer.... In a career that spanned four decades, during which he became one of Latin America's most distinctive literary voices."
--Alejandro Chacoff, The New Yorker"Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to "Emilio Renzi" a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Piglia's prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life. Amid meeting redheads at bars, he dissects styles and structures with a surgeon's precision, turning his gaze on a range of writers, from Plato to Dashiell Hammett, returning time and again to Pavese, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Arlt and Borges. Chock-full of lists of books and films he consumed in those voracious early years of call girls, carbon paper, amphetamines and Heidegger, this is an embarrassment of riches -- by turns an inspiring master class in narrative analysis, an accounting of the pesos left in his pockets and a novel of Piglia's grandfather (named Emilio, natch) with his archive of World War I materials pilfered from Italian corpses.... No previous familiarity with Piglia's work is needed to appreciate these bibliophilic diaries, adroitly repurposed through a dexterous game of representation and masks that speaks volumes of the role of the artist in society, the artist in his time, the artist in his tradition."
--Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice"A valediction from the noted Argentine writer, known for bringing the conventions of hard-boiled U.S. crime drama into Latin American literature...Fans of Cortázar, Donoso, and Gabriel García Márquez will find these to be eminently worthy last words from Piglia."
--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review"Ricardo Piglia, who passed away earlier this year at age seventy-five, is celebrated as one of the giants of Argentine literature, a rightful heir to legends like Borges, Cortázar, Juan Jose Saer, and Roberto Arlt. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is his life's work...An American equivalent might be if Philip Roth now began publishing a massive, multi-volume autobiography in the guise of Nathan Zuckerman...It is truly a great work...This is a fantastic, very rewarding read--it seems that Piglia has found a form that can admit everything he has to say about his life, and it is a true pleasure to take it in."
--Scott Esposito, BOMB Magazine"Here through the Boom and Bolaño breech storms Ricardo Piglia, not just a great Latin American writer but a great writer of the American continent. Composed across his entire career,
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is Piglia's secret story of his shadow self--a book of disquiet and love and literary obsession that blurs the distinctness of each and the other."
--Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)
