''Respiración artificial'' is an
Argentine
Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish (masculine) or (feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, s ...
novel, written by
Ricardo Piglia
Ricardo Piglia (November 24, 1941 in Adrogué, Argentina – January 6, 2017 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine author, critic, and scholar best known for introducing hard-boiled fiction to the Argentine public.
Biography
Born in Adrogué, Piglia ...
. It was first published in 1980. Praised by critics, the work has been the subject of several studies. The epigraph which opens the novel (”We had the experience but missed the meaning, an approach to the meaning restores the experience″) is a quote by
T.S Eliot and the key to understanding the novel. The back cover of the book reads: “Conceived as a system of quotes, cultural references, allusions, plagiarisms, parodies and pastiches, Piglia's novel is not only the realization of
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...
's old dream (”to make a work consisting only of quotes“); it is as well a modern and subtle
detective novel
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as s ...
″.
The first part of the novel corresponds with the epistolary genre, and it unfolds an enigmatic plot based upon four characters of different generations – the uncle, Marcelo Maggi, his nephew, the young writer Emilio Renzi, the uncle's father-in-law and the father-in-law's grandfather – and their relations with Argentina's political life from the middle nineteenth century till the 1970s.
The nexus between them is the great-grandfather's memoirs, a syphilitic in exile who commits suicide, and whose writings were kept by the family.
The second part is the one which critics find the most attractive, in which two characters discuss extensively literary theories and in these conversations Piglia bestows culture and scholarship.
It isn't a coincidence that the young writer's name, Emilio Renzi, is both Piglia's middle name and his mother's last name.
Argentine detective novels
Spanish-language novels
1980 novels
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