Assumed Name.

Williams, Raymond Leslie

Known primarily as the author of two fine novels, Ricardo Piglia has also been writing short fiction since the late 1960s. Five of the six stories in Assumed Name were written in 1975, well before the publication of his novels Artificial Respiration (1979) and La ciudad ausente (1992). This short fiction does contain several of the thematic concerns of Piglia's novels, and three of them even include one of his key characters, Emilio Renzi. They were written under the sign of the Argentines Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortazar.

The fiction of Ricardo Piglia is one of the aesthetical innovative and perhaps most politically significant since the writings of Julio Cortazar, and it certainly posits a forceful response to some neo-Marxists' categorization of the postmodern as politically conservative. His books are best read as one body of fictions, and can be seen as an outgrowth of those Borges stories that blur the line between fiction and essay, such as "The Library of Babel" and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Piglia's writing is a fictional meditation that can also be read as essays and, to a certain extent, must be read as political essays. His fiction is a major rewriting of Argentine history and literature.

Assumed Name contains an introduction by the translator Sergio Gabriel Waisman, a quotation from Roberto Arlt ("The only things that we lose are those that we never really had"), an authorial note by Piglia, the six stories, and, at the end, Waisman's notes on the translation. The book is populated with marginalized and often frail and aging characters. They live anguished lives in their attempts to understand their circumstance by deciphering the written and spoken word.

In "The End of the Ride" Emilio Renzi takes a bus trip to visit his dying father in a hospital. During the trip, he befriends a solitary woman who claims to be a former opera singer, Aida. After his father dies in the hospital, Renzi goes to Aida's apartment. "Mousy Benitez Sang Boleros" details the relationship between two over-the-hill and hopeless boxers. A superb story, "The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime," deals with not only a man's loss of a woman but also the creation of fiction.

The title story, "Assumed Name," is a lengthy and complex text with two parts. The first, "Homage to Roberto Arlt," is Piglia's "report" or "abstract" concerning the supposed ownership of a text by Arlt. Part 2, "Appendix: Luba," is a story supposedly printed from an unpublished manuscript that Piglia found. The issues of ownership and authorship, however, are just as ambiguous at the end as they were in the beginning.

The volume has been very well conceived by Piglia, the translator, and the publisher. Waisman's renderings are consistently smooth and obviously well informed. The book's fortunate publication in English provides anglophone readers access to one of Latin America's most accomplished contemporary writers.

Raymond Leslie Williams University of Colorado, Boulder