authors influenced by Pynchon

[Ya Sam]

Ricardo Piglia. The Absent City. Trans. Sergio Waisman. Duke Univ. Press, 
2000. 147 pp. Paper: $15.95.



This is the third of Piglia’s books to be translated into English, and it 
marks him as a worthy successor to the likes of Borges and Cortázar. The 
novel takes place against a fantastical reconstruction of Argentina’s 
notorious “Dirty War” period of military dictatorship (1976-1983). Its 
anachronous plot follows a journalist named Junior on a quest for a 
storytelling machine created by the Argentinian poet-novelist Macedonio 
Fernández as a substitute for his dead—possibly “disappeared”—wife Elena. 
Like Galatea, the Muses, Scheherazade, Beatrice, and other avatars of the 
Holy Ghost and the Eternal Feminine, the cybernetic, schizophrenic Elena 
serves as an elaborate conceit for the hopeful, life-sustaining, 
reproductive powers of the imagination. She acquires political significance 
by disseminating and generating alternate realities that work against the 
repressive drive toward total domination. Whether that drive takes form in 
the Argentinian police state, American cultural imperialism, Japanese-style 
conformity, scientific reductionism, or the triumph of death, total 
domination cannot be achieved as long as people believe that reality can be 
transformed into “an eternal story, where everything always starts again.” 
Among the literary allusions Piglia invests with this theme are ingenious 
reworkings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Poe’s “William Wilson,” Joyce’s 
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Like the 
open-ended paranoid quests of Borges, Pynchon, and DeLillo, The Absent City 
is frequently confusing. But Waisman’s introduction and Piglia’s afterword 
provide helpful thematic and historical background, and overcoming the 
plot’s difficulties should satisfy anyone interested in seeing how intricate 
literary puzzles reflect the political significance of the narrative 
imagination. Macedonio’s recreation of Elena represents the need to 
transform a repressive “objective” reality into a hopeful virtual reality, 
and Piglia’s hall-of-mirrors novel reiterates why such a transformation must 
remain eternally deferred—yet always possible. [Thomas Hove]

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/bookreviews/01_2/absentcity.html

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