me encanta piglia pero este libro no me hizo nada. la parte de la intriga del libro se disipó rapidísimo; la parte filosófico-literaria..parecia que el autor tenia esas notas de algún curso que dio y dijo las pego acá en el medio de la novela y lleno páginas. EL desenlace dejó que desear. ( )

The Way Out by Ricardo Piglia

Emilio Renzi, a middle-aged Argentine writer arrives at a University in New Jersey to teach a graduate seminar in the Dept. of Cultural Studies. Invited by an attractive, brilliant charismatic scholar, Ida Brown, to teach a course in environmental writing with a focus on WH Hudson and Joseph Conrad. Renzi is a renowned scholar on Hudson who was an Anglo with Argentine roots and wrote at the same time that Conrad was writing his masterpieces; Brown was considered a major expert in Conrad’s studies of the negative impacts of colonialism.

What starts off as a smart insightful campus novel (think DeLillo, Roth, or Chabon) slowly evolves into a detective story involving a mysterious radical figure. The Recycler, as he is called, is a stand in for the Unabomber who mailed bombs to academics he thought complicit in environmental degradations.

Piglia has a long tradition of writing about the dangers of the modern state informed by his living through military juntas (see Absent City and Artificial Respiration)) and detective stories (see Money to Burn and Target in the Night). There are many interesting characters introduced as Renzi takes on the task of discovering any possible connections between the bomber and Ida Brown with whom he develops a casual intimate relationship. The story is fast moving with intelligent insights into radical politics, American culture, and history.

To give a flavor of his writing, here he describes a neighbor who was a retired professor of Russian Literature, 80 year old Nina Andropova, who was writing a monumental biography, Tolstoy, The Novelist:
“…[she]still thought the czar and his court were responsible for the catastrophes in Russia and that the revolution had been a fire…destroying its heroes and then terrorizing the whole town…when she took the train to Finland. Ever since she left Russia, she’d lived with the ashen taste of exile on her lips.”

Russian language tended “toward mystical expression…the essential problem was that there were no terms in Russian for the topology of Western thoughts and feelings. Everything is passionate and extreme. It’s impossible to say good afternoon without it sounding like a threat.”

Piglia’s humor becomes evident when Nina comments, “in good novels nothing turns out well”.

Being, in part, a campus novel, Piglia critiques: “positions in remote places, teaching apathetic students, facing the conflicts among colleagues to find a position and survive there until tenure.” A phrase that could have come out a recent essay I skimmed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Tenured, Trapped and Miserable in the Humanities” by William Pannapecker.

Or of students; “years as graduate students, when life seems to pass like a long parenthesis before you confront the harsh winter of real experience.”

Of his audience Renzi seems to mock the reader: “a sad group of readers who went on thinking about the enchanting quality of literary texts.” Piglia writes as if his pen were a tongue in his cheek.

Renzi often finds himself insomniac, walking the streets of Princeton at odd hours. He befriends a homeless person, an ex-professor, named Orion, whom he complains to that his ex-wife living in his apartment in Buenos Aires with another writer he dislikes “poking around my books and papers” to which Orion replies, “Monsieur its better to have nothing.”

In the manifesto he publishes, The Recycler quotes Wittgenstein: “It isn’t absurd, that is, to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity” ( a theme of Piglia’s The Absent City). The Recycler lives in the middle of nowhere in a cabin he built “his life into autonomous sequences which obeyed the calm and stillness of changes in nature. The question wasn’t how to think about life but rather how to live in order to think.”

AS Renzi makes his way to California to interview the Recycler he finds himself in Berkely filled with characters: failed PhD candidates, barmaids, draft dodgers, ageing hippies and rock groupies one of whom “spoke short and epigrammatic phrases, as if she was spraying graffiti on the walls of the mind…she was a modern girl, spoke in word blocks, not sentences, and let herself be guided by excitement”.

The book is chock full of allusions to various writers: Conrad, Melville, Hudson, Tolstoy, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and Daphne Du Maurier, and also films like Hitchcock and Jean Luc-Godard. An enjoyable tour of literature, film, history, political science, and history reflective of the wide grasp of Piglia’s thinking and imagination.

Piglia, taught at Princeton University and his knowledge of campus life is well depicted. This book was published after his recent death. Robert Croll has produced a masterly translation and is also responsible for the magnificent 3 volumes of The Diaries of Emilio Renzi which may be considered Ricardo Piglia’s masterpiece lifelong work. ( )