Overview
The stories in Assumed Name, written before the 1976 military coup d'etat in Argentina, invoke a stark socio-political situation that foreshadows the repressive dictatorship that the country was to suffer from 1976 to 1983. But the plight of the marginalized characters in these stories is also a universal one, as they search for ways to communicate and live with each other, and to come to terms with the reality in which they find themselves. "Assumed Name," the novella which gives its title to the collection, is a unique and fascinating piece - doubling at times as literary criticism - reminiscent of the style exemplified by Jorge Luis Borges' work. The author himself is the protagonist attempting to solve the mystery of an unpublished manuscript allegedly written by the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt."Complete translation of Nombre falso, for which Sergio Gabriel Waisman earned a Eugene M. Kayden Meritorious Achievement Award in 1995. Given the stature of Piglia's writing and its potential interest to English-language scholars and students of contemporary Argentine literature, one wishes for more extensive introductory and bibliographical material"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Synopsis
The stories in Assumed Name, written before the 1976 military coup d'etat in Argentina, invoke a stark socio-political situation that foreshadows the repressive dictatorship that the country was to suffer from 1976 to 1983. But the plight of the marginalized characters in these stories is also a universal one, as they search for ways to communicate and live with each other, and to come to terms with the reality in which they find themselves. "Assumed Name," the novella which gives its title to the collection, is a unique and fascinating piece - doubling at times as literary criticism - reminiscent of the style exemplified by Jorge Luis Borges' work. The author himself is the protagonist attempting to solve the mystery of an unpublished manuscript allegedly written by the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt.
Publishers Weekly
Argentinian writer and critic Piglia (Artificial Respiration) borrows shamelessly from Borges and other postmodern writers in this eponymous novella and five accompanying short stories-now translated 20 years after their first appearance in Spanish. But that borrowing is a conscious aesthetic choice that underscores a recurring theme in this cerebral collection: originality is a myth. Consonant with this theme, seemingly separate stories-all of which are set in Argentina between the 1950s and the 1970s-touch in tangential ways. ``The End of the Ride,'' for example, focuses on a journalist named Emilio Renzi returning home by a series of indirect train routes to face a host of mysteries surrounding his father's suicide. Renzi then reappears as a minor character in the title novella, which, in turn, focuses on a literary scholar named Ricardo Piglia, who's reconstructing the shadowy circumstances in which an unpublished (and fictional) story by the famous (and actual) Argentinian author Roberto Arlt was written. The tales are thick with inside jokes and references to Argentinian history and culture. Collectively, they try to dissolve the strict divisions between fact and fiction, reality and dreaming and, ultimately, as far as a reader is concerned, literature and criticism. (Oct.)