Ricardo Piglia: between the lines of a literary detective: writer Ricardo Piglia creates a fascinating amalgam, mixing genres and styles that reflect historical and social circumstances of his native Argentina.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

Writers, like everyone else, labor in the shadow of their predecessors. For some, the relationship can be antagonistic, angry, a resentful struggle to break free, even if it means trashing accomplishments of those who came before. Others prosper, appreciatively embracing their legacy, taking from it what they need and moving on to find their own turf and voice.

Ricardo Piglia, today widely considered Argentina's premier writer, certainly belongs to the second group. His output pays tribute to foreign giants like James Joyce and William Faulkner and such countrymen as Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, and Macedonio Fernandez. He works within established genres--the traditional detective story, science fiction, historical novels, and literary criticism--but, through a flux of singular ingenuity and imagination, Piglia has managed to forge an amalgam distinctly his own. His narratives, which mix fact with fiction and employ a variety of high- and low-brow devices, possess a kaleidoscopic quality. At first seemingly random, gradually they congeal into coherent patterns, effectively rendering the complex socio-political issues he addresses. Piglia does not indulge in the labyrinthine streams of consciousness associated with Joyce (despite a photo of the Irish author in his work room), nor is he partial to the terse constructs of that other maze maker, Borges. Piglia uses words efficiently but favors dense, rambling dialogues--two writers haggling in a cafe, a seminar discussion between professor and students, or a detective mumbling to himself as he sifts through evidence and testimony. Piglia has said, "Language is a common property.... We writers place marks to detain its flow. Language is a circulation with a common flow. Literature disrupts that flow."

Given his reputation for hard-boiled themes, one might expect Piglia to come across as a tough guy, but in fact he is a refined man of letters who enjoys talking about politics and literature when he is not at the computer writing: Friendly and informal, he expresses himself in short, compressed bursts that barely keep pace with the rapid sense of possible directions his thought processes take him. Piglia shares his passion for literature with his wife of fifteen years, Beba Eguia, a professional translator. They live in a traditional casa chorizo (a house narrow at the street end with many rooms off a long hallway) in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Not surprisingly, Piglia admires authors of unending narratives, like Fernandez, who labored for forty-five years writing his Museo de la novela de la eterna (a massive treatise not published until long after his death). Since late adolescence, Piglia himself has maintained a diary that now fills dozens of notebooks stashed in a carton at his studio.

"Now I'm finishing the second version of a novel called `Blanco nocturno,' which has to do with the Malvinas war," he says. "The title refers to some infrared visors that the English used to see in the dark. It is a love story. The protagonist, Emilio Renzi, has a little crisis and closes himself up in a family house with his diary in order to read it. He's taken by the idea of reading his life, of playing a kind of detective who looks at these notebooks in order to find the reasons for what has happened."

Piglia's alter ego, Emilio Renzi, plays a central role in many stories, always as some sort of investigator. The name derives from Ricardo Emilio Piglia Renzi, the author's full name assigned at birth, in 1941, in the resort town of Adrogue, south of the capital.

We can not know whether destiny selected this birthplace for Piglia, as part of some cosmic plan, but undeniably Adrogue occupies an important place in the literary consciousness of Argentina. There, in the early 1900s, Borges as a boy often summered with his family at the Hotel Las Delicias. "As a teenager I knew that hotel well before its demolition in 1956," says Piglia, "because the school I attended was right next door. As the villa of General Berkeley, the hotel figures in Borges's `The Form of the Sword,' also as the model for the Triste-le-Roy in `Death and the Compass.' Borges also penned a fine tribute in his poem `Adrogue.' The town had an excellent public library, which he used. Later in life, he returned...