Respiracion artificial.

Case, Thomas E.

The definition of the modern novel, since its origins in the sixteenth century, has always been elusive and vague, and never has this form been more problematic than in the late twentieth century. Ricardo Piglia's Respiracion artificial is an example of what can be done with bits and pieces, memoirs, letters, intricate indirect discourse, cafe chitchat, and historical anecdote which in content, if not in form, fulfills Walter Benjamin's dream of a novel made only of quotations. In this enjoyable, well-written work all the dead matter is somehow brought back to life by pumping metaphysical oxygen into its corpse. Even the cover--a photograph of the young Franz Kafka with a spurious Nazi stamp--acquires meaning in time.

There are two foci: one is the letters and other accounts of the final days of Enrique Ossorio, a close associate of and traitor to Rosas, the dictator of the young Argentine Republic in the first half of the nineteenth century, and his family's attempt to clear his besmirched honor; the other is the curious destiny of Vladimir Tardewski, a Polish refugee. The scene of the dialogues and discourses is the Club Social in Concordia, a city in the northern province of Entre Rios, where intellectual life languishes. The club provides the forum where several culture-seeking individuals, including Ossorio's biographer, e local poet, a professor, Tardewski, and a few others, meet to vent their minds and exchange ideas. Ossorio's story, through letters and memoirs, is interesting enough, but Tardewski's saga overshadows all else and is replete with commentaries on the intellectual pretentiousness of the Argentine university establishment, with recollections of his failed career in philosophy and his mysterious arrival and subsequent life in Argentina.

Tardewski, a one-time student of the philosopher Wittgenstein at Cambridge, is in Warsaw in 1939 researching aspects of the life of Franz Kafka when the Germans invade Poland. Unable to resume his studies in England, he escapes to Buenos Aires and later makes it to Concordia. His research is buried with him in the boondocks and now comes to light in his discussions with his provincial colleagues. "Yo soy un hombre enteramente hecho de citas," he proclaims, and reveals how the unsuccessful artist Adolf Hitler (what would history be like if he had been successful?), like a twentieth-century Descartes, changed the course of modern thought with his madness. Tardewski's discovery: the Fuhrer was a habitue of the same circle in Prague as Kafka in 1909-10. Hitler's ranting in the cafe provided his eager listener, the future author of The Trial and "Metamorphosis," his ideas of the horrors of state terrorism. Kafka died in 1924 at exactly the same time Hitler was writing Mein Kampf in the prison at Landsberg. Kafka has become our Dante, for he entered the nightmare of our reality and described it for us.

The author of several novels and collections of essays, Ricardo Piglia is a convincing Sherlock Holmes or G. K. Chesterton in the weaving of his intriguing discourses.

Thomas E. Case San Diego State University