Absent City

La ciudad ausente

In a country where history is absent, some are trying to protect and rescue its memory. This is a textual dialogue between the contemporary Latin American literary master Piglià and other great writers such as Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, and Dante. Is this a detective story, a love story, a political allegory, or a science fiction novel?
✒️ Editor's Recommendation◎ The Chinese version of the masterpiece by Ricardo Piglià, a master of contemporary Latin American literature, is now available.
Argentine writer Ricardo Piglía is considered "one of Latin America's most distinctive literary voices," having won numerous major Spanish-language literary awards. His novel, "The City of Absence," is one of his representative novels and has been translated into numerous languages. It was also adapted into an opera by Gerardo Gandini, a leading 20th-century Argentine composer.
◎ Literary resistance in a military dictatorship. In a country where history is absent, some people are trying to protect and rescue memory.
Latin America has a long history of totalitarianism, particularly in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. This book is set during the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, during which writers and intellectuals who opposed the dictatorship often disappeared inexplicably.
In the book, when the stories output by the "female machine" spread the truth, the police intervene to destroy it, thereby ensuring the stability of social discourse and the erasure of memory. Saving this machine is to protect and rescue our right to remember: she is eternal, a river of stories, and the never-ending voice that keeps memory fresh.
◎ A pioneering narrative that transcends genre boundaries. This is the lure of an endlessly fascinating story thrown by Piglia.
Beneath the guise of a captivating detective story, this book is also a love story about love and loss, a political allegory for the oppressive reality of close surveillance, and a cyberpunk science fiction novel reminiscent of the works of William Burroughs. Here, like the streets of Buenos Aires, multiple clues overlap, blurring the boundaries of narrative and amplifying the story's allure.
Piglia argues that "all stories are detective stories." He encrypts the text with his unbridled creativity, and the reader becomes the detective to decode it. Reading this novel, we feel as if we could spend a lifetime trying to solve the mystery.
◎ A textual dialogue between great writers, this is a rich presentation of Piglia's poetic universe.
In addition to being a novelist, Piglia is also an accomplished literary critic. In his fiction, he often incorporates postmodern structural and narrative techniques such as intertextuality and parody, presenting profound insights into the differences between truth and fiction, politics and literature, and history and the present moment through dialogues with classic authors.
In The City of Absence, Piglia frequently interweaves texts by writers such as Borges, Joyce, Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James, and even includes references to Macedonio Fernández, Robert Alter, The Divine Comedy, and The Thousand and One Nights. His masterful narrative technique offers us a glimpse into his rich poetic universe.
✒️ Synopsis: After receiving a tip-off, Junior, a reporter in Buenos Aires, embarks on a journey to track down a mysterious machine.
This machine, which possesses the mind and soul of a woman and can spout stories, was created by a character of the same name, the pioneering Argentinian novelist Macedonio Fernández, after the woman's death. Its purpose is to immortalize her in the storytelling of her beloved.
In addition to personal love memories, the machine also guards the collective memory circulating in the city. As she insinuates reality and spreads the truth through layers of text and tape recordings, the police intervene and try to destroy the machine.
Junior wanders around the city, jumping in and out of different stories, trying to unravel a clue that is always filled with waiting and delays. Until one day, he arrives at an island at the end of the world...
✒️ Celebrity & Media Recommendations: Clearly, Piglia follows in the footsteps of the whimsical Macedonio Fernández and the two noir geniuses, Roberto Alter and Juan Carlos Onetti. But he remains a writer of original genius, his unconventional imagination pushing the boundaries of traditional narrative. "The City of Absence," a parody of detective stories, entices readers to keep reading, wondering not "what will happen next" but "what just happened."
—Robert Coover, American postmodernist writer A truly astonishing and innovative novel from one of Latin America's most admired writers. Piglia plays with dark truths and fantastical adventures into a swirling story.
—Gwen Kirkpatrick Pigglia is Argentina's foremost novelist, a captivating writer and socially committed intellectual who boldly explores the complex relationship between politics and fiction. The Absent City is a work of our time, transcending national boundaries.
—Francine Marcelo There is no doubt that Piglia is one of the writers who has made the greatest contribution to the development of noir fiction in the Rio de la Plata region.
—Mempo Chiardines, Argentine literary critic. Two characteristics animate Piglia's work: first, his aesthetic affinity for outsiders and the margins of society, which in turn makes him wary of the power dynamics between oppression and resistance; second, his nostalgia for a nearly forgotten past. ... In his novel "The City of Absence," the swirling story takes the reader back half a century, partly in search of the legendary Macedonio Fernández, Borges's spiritual mentor. And what do we encounter in that world? Motels, seedy taverns, tape recorders, mad scientists, down-and-out writers, lost letters, and so on.
——The Times Literary Supplement
One of Latin America’s most distinctive literary voices… It is this premise of conspiracy as routine—which is central to Piglià’s work—that is most prophetic.
—The New Yorker
His great literary talents include: setting the plot in a precise world, accurate observation of facts and characters, clear language, and a literary wisdom that keeps the reader fascinated by him and maintains tension between the story and the underlying poetic power.
—— Award Speech for the Romulo Gallegos Literature Prize

2022-07-01

四川文艺出版社

Houlang, Houlang Literature

208

9787541163623