Re-reading this in English... why doesn't Goodreads have it? Lame, goodreads. Lame. Anyway, this is one of my favorite books. It's like reading literary theory set in fiction. It sounds about 9999x times better in Spanish, but then again, for what book is that *not* true, other than Grossman's wonderful "DQ." This English translation does a good job highlighting Piglia's Faulknerian style, combined with this oddly tense Hemingway terse detective fiction style (which is where Piglia's Onetti homage comes in). It's Daniel Balderston's 1994 Duke University Press edition, btw. One thing that's useful about reading this edition in English is that it comes with all these handy endnotes about Argentinean history and culture, which I found incredibly useful--Piglia is a historian by training, and there are a *lot* of references to Argentinean dictators and folk heroes and indigineous legends and poems and songs and so on. It's making me realize that a lot must have gone over my head in the first reading. Sorry for all the spelling errors in this btw.

Talvez Piglia tenha posto aqui mais especificidades históricas argentinas do que um brasileiro médio é capaz de reconhecer; talvez a estrutura de toda a primeira metade seja hermética demais para que eu tenha podido extrair dela qualquer significado; talvez o livro pedisse, para ser adequadamente decifrado, um leitor mais paciente do que eu; talvez Piglia seja um grande intelectual da literatura, mas não um grande escritor; não me sinto capaz de determinar qual ou quais dessas possibilidades são mais reais. As longas discussões - monólogos, na verdade, e em uma voz que suspeito ser perigosamente próxima à do próprio Piglia - sobre Borges e Kafka (e, en passant, Joyce, Wittgenstein - the usual suspects -, além de Roberto Arlt e um punhado de intelectuais menores argentinos) na segunda metade quase fazem o livro valer como um todo. No entanto, ao final, apenas senti o gosto de deslocamento. Como se esse homem, que claramente leu e viu nos livros muito mais do que eu, tivesse tentado salvar a própria obra enxertando análise literária em doses concentradas da metade pro fim. Não acho que tenha adiantado, mas me deu vontade de ler, se não seus outros romances, ao menos seus ensaios e diários. Um grande leitor, ele é.

You know how people say that Don Quixote may be the greatest work of chivalric literature, or that the Princess Bride may be the best romantic comedy, when they are both parodic and self-conscious stories that play on the rules of their chosen genre? Well, Respiración artificial, in a similar vein, just may be the best novel by Borges that Borges never wrote.

The novel requires some time to get acclimated. The narrative point of view jumps around, from the novel’s present to an earlier part of one character’s life, even back into a biographical 19th century and (frames within frames within frames!) an attempted novel written in the 19th century.

Honestly, I got a bit lost with the 19th-century Ossorio, and also regarding the alleged observer of the 20th-century Ossorio. Was he real or not? Why was he looking for coded messages? Then again, that’s part of the game being played on the reader—we are slowly being lowered into a Borgesian labyrinth of layered time frames and facts so elusive that they may never have existed at all. There seems to be, it feels like there is, some code, some series of threads connecting the actions of these disparate people, but the ultimate goal remains unclear.

The final part of the novel, when Renzi goes to meet with his uncle, is undoubtedly my favorite part. The uncle passes much of his time in what has to be the most cosmopolitan, well-educated, and well-read social club in the entire western hemisphere, and so different characters elaborate on themes in great depth. The reader is treated to several different monologues about themes of literature and politics. The comparison of Borges (dubbed a 19th-century author) and Arlt (called the best, and most misunderstood, Argentine author of the 20th) could have been read as a keynote at a conference and received a standing ovation. I have to say though, Renzi is really full of himself (as is the neighborhood sonnet writer).

Tardewski’s narration of his own life, and his complete dedication to failure, is the book’s crowning jewel. He is like a 20th-century Bartleby, who is handed all the potential to act, but becomes convicted of the emptiness of the action that is asked of him. The connection he makes between Descartes, Heidigger, and Hitler should keep every academic awake at night and her/his feet planted on the ground instead of lost within the ivory tower. The fleeting connection between Kafka and Hitler, with ol' Franz serving as an example of how one can still write literature after staring at the horrors of the Nazis (and not fall prey to the siren call of that abusive power), will really stick with me. Perhaps that's also a comment on the valuable peripheral position of authors not from traditionally-powerful nations? Authors of "minor" literature, as Deleuze dubbed him. Overall, that section reminds me of the film The Childhood of a Leader, which takes us through the early life of a future European dictator, but this horror is expressed better and the world Tardewski describes is more filled-out.

In the end, it’s not who wrote it—it’s who reads that matters.

This is a challenging book, and I would be very particular in recommending it even though I loved it. It sounds arrogant to say, but a lot of this content would go over your head if you’re not at least somewhat familiar with Argentine literature (like my doomed reading of Nabokov’s The Gift. The sections of that novel parody different Russian authors whom I haven’t read, and everything just went over my head.). It rewards the effort though and, even though there is basically no action in the novel, I found it riveting. I don’t think I could stand a steady stream of these heady, monologue novels, but Respiración artificial is really incredible.

"To speak of the unspeakable is to put in danger the survival of language as the bearer of human truth. A mortal risk. In the Castle a man dictates, paces, and dictates, surrounded by his assistants. Words saturated by lies and horror, said Tardewski, cannot easily be used to sum up life."

Speechless. Will hopefully stumble back into this plane of reality and meaning shortly, else I will be permanently lost in the ether of layered parallelisms and paradoxes of realist history. Oops.

I think that this would have been impossible to read as I originally planned to—absent context. Now, having already made it through "The Invention of Argentina" and La ciudad ausente and Blanco nocturno, being familiar with Renzi and Tardewski as characters and familiar with the important figures of Argentine historical consciousness from Sarmiento to Alberdi to Rosas, I was able to understand a fair portion of the musings. I need to return to this after delving more into Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Joyce, and Borges, to really begin to understand how this text works as a theory of literary history. Whew. The strange part is, this is the sort of book that has me planning my next read-through the second I put down the last page, crying.