THE DIARIES OF EMILIO RENZI
Formative Years
By Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Robert Croll
448 pp. Restless Books. Paper, $19.99.
Cognizant of his impending death, Piglia, the Argentine titan of letters who died of A.L.S. in January, prepared his 327 notebooks for publication in a trilogy. This first installment covers 1957-67, the salad days of a whip-smart, arrogant, ambitious young man determined to forge himself, against his father’s wishes, as a writer, the spots on his skin proof of his “alchemical pacts with the national language’s secret flame.”
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, or of Piglia’s cat-burglar friend who is the “man of action” foil to E.R.’s cerebral gymnastics, to his constant “failing in the business of living.”
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 (and perched just on the border of that tradition, peering in à la Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window”). Piglia’s “delusion of living in the third person” to “avoid the illusion of an interior life” transmogrifies us as well, into the character of the reader, and “that feeling is priceless.”
AFFECTIONS
By Rodrigo Hasbún
Translated by Sophie Hughes
132 pp. Simon & Schuster. $23.
This slim, striking novel recounts the bizarre story, in poignant shimmering flashes and the subtle interstices separating those flashes, of the Ertl family as imagined by Hasbún. Hans Ertl, Leni Riefenstahl’s star cameraman “but hardly a model father,” is forced to start anew in Bolivia after the war. When we meet them in 1955, his wife and three daughters have already been in La Paz for a year and a half, and the family’s visionary patriarch is about to embark on yet another filming expedition, this time searching for the ancient Incan city of Paitití. He recruits his two older daughters, Monika and Heidi, in the service of his doomed chimera, while young Trixi stays home and learns to smoke cigarettes with her mother, who is already ill with the disease that will soon take her life.
Continue reading the main storyIt is Trixi who clings to the idea of the Ertl family the longest, while Heidi repatriates and Monika — “the ex-depressive, the quasi-Bolivian” — sets out on a path into die-hard militancy with the National Liberation Army, becoming known as Che Guevara’s avenger after killing Toto Quintanilla. Strange and tragic as the Ertls’ story is, they are revealed here as also just a family, with a sole parent they have little choice but to support and hope to depend on. Hasbún’s anti-expository prose is very effective, with fine details like the “dinner of tortillas and sauerkraut” they eat on their way into the rain forest, and the “poster of Lake Titicaca on the wall” at the Bolivian consulate in Hamburg before Monika fires her Colt Cobra.
His kaleidoscopic, enigmatic style veers slightly into the cryptic in the italicized epilogue, in which the two Bolivian brothers hired by Hans to dig a grave are set against the image of “the German,” eating straight out of tin cans and with dogs as his only companions, his hacienda already a nostalgic tomb lined with the “20 or so photos on the wall that summed up their lives.” Hasbún offers a suggestive rendering of a certain potent artistic drive that is often incompatible with fatherhood, notwithstanding Hans’s talent for reinvention.
RETURN TO THE DARK VALLEY
By Santiago Gamboa
Translated by Howard Curtis
461 pp. Europa. Paper, $18.
Gamboa’s latest is the story of a Colombian writer abroad, a former consul to India among other itinerant jobs, who has been working on an essay about Rimbaud since he left his home country 10 years earlier. He arrives in Madrid at the behest of an old friend, Juana, in the midst of a Boko Haram hostage situation at the Irish embassy there, and ends up almost dying and almost killing a man who was roughing up his mistress, a poet of considerable talent named Manuela. The story of the consul’s incarcerated recuperation alternates with the embedded biography of Rimbaud, the life story of an Argentine extremist who goes by the name Tertullian and claims to be the pope’s son, and Manuela’s epistolary explanation to a psychologist of her back story, which involves literary betrayal, crack-fueled convent orgies and redemption through education. When the consul has been cleared of murder charges, the threads come together, sending him, along with Juana, Manuela and Tertullian, back to Colombia to seek revenge on the man who raped Manuela and murdered her mother.
Action-packed plotting propels this rabidly contemporary novel forward, as it examines the movement of people across the shifting geopolitical landscape, the impossibility of returning and the potential redemptive power of poetry. Gamboa’s assured writing is best showcased in the chronicle of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, and in his take on post-peace-process Colombia, “for decades … the most beautiful and flower-bedecked mass grave in Latin America.” Other voices are less successful, and the novel too often relies on coincidences to bring the characters together, including, oddly, extreme sexual violation as a defining catalyst in their personal development. Ultimately, one is left with the feeling that their lives — as messy as they are — are too tidy.
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