The Initial Manifestation. Conversations at Princeton

ESSAY. ETERNA CADENCIA, 2015. 264 PAGES.

In the recent essays, conversations and interviews that make up this volume, Piglia uses conversation, which he sees as the initial manifestation of any intellectual endeavour, to explore some problems of fiction and their consequences. Several preoccupations stand out: the renewal of novella-style narrative modes, hypotheses about their distinctiveness, formal aspects, their relationship with the short story and the novel, their style and the formal methods employed by Onetti in Los adioses (The Goodbyes) the quintessential novella. These conversations also feature, in the author's words "an attempt to transmit the experience of writing and teaching literature." This leads to further topics such as the use of language and the experience of fiction, fiction's place in relation to politics and teaching and the meaning all this has for him as a critic and a writer.

With recognisably conversational dynamism and arguments, these texts can be read as either an introduction to or an updated overview of the fundamental issues to be found in the critical and fictional work of Ricardo Piglia, a leading light in Latin American literature.