The Diaries of Emilio Renzi. The Happy Years

DIARIES. ANAGRAMA, 2016. 424 PAGES.

This second volume of the three that make up The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, purportedly written by Ricardo Piglia's alter ego, covers the period between 1968 and 1975. While the previous book portrayed the development of a budding writer, now his career in Argentinian literature consolidates itself with the direction of a magazine, editorial work, articles, courses and conferences.

His passion for and obsession with literature is revealed in ideas and drafts for stories and novels, readings, meetings with major writers - Borges, Puig, Roa Bastos, Piñera...- and his peers, his thoughts on writing and the work of classic authors and crime novelists, discoveries, interests and revelations.

And it also includes travel, his personal and romantic life and Argentina at a turbulent time: the death of Peron, the emergence of guerrilla groups and the military coup...

In the prologue for this book, Renzi, leaning on a bar, talks to a barman and confesses: "I write a diary and diaries follow the progression of days, months and years. That's all a diary can do, it's not autobiography, it's not an intimate confession, or even a record of a person's life, it simply demands that the texts are ordered by the days of the week and the months of the year. That's all. That's all. You can write anything (...) in my case it's a surprising mixture of details, meetings with friends and testimony of events that I've experienced (...) these discoveries, these flights of fancy, these confusing moments were my course changes and I organized my life around them." And so this new volume of The Diaries of Emilio Renzi continues to explore the experiences, doubts and literary reflections of a writer, giving shape to what the author describes as ‘the novel of my life'.

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