the absent city / ricardo piglia

The idea of a man in love who walks through the city that belongs to him, but where the  city in which he walked with the woman he loved is lost. Because the city is a memory machine. Of course, that lost or absent city also includes other moments  of life, not just those associated with a woman, This is how Joyce’s Dublin works …

in the novel, he tries to save her [his wife], when she become terminally ill, by placing her memories in a machine … the machine then outlives the man. 

But it’s no use, if you leave, your memories still go with you.

I do not have any photographs of her, only my memories …

She … hid all the words she knew in her memory.

Her memory was a breeze blowing in the white curtains of a room in an empty house.

He hoped the sentences would enter his daughter’s memory

 Like blocks of meaning.

She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along.

“It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said, “there are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up.”

They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map.

This is a place without memories, she said. Everybody pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s.

… the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory …

He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory ..

You see it there, on the edge of language, like the meory of one’s house from childhood

He had discovered the existence of the verbal nuclei that keep remembrances alive, words they had used that brought back all the pain into his memory ..

He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body has gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates.

… if I try to remember, and the purity of the memory does not blind me …

I pull events out of live memories …

Amazon Books.

Widely acclaimed throughout Latin America after its 1992 release in Argentina, The Absent City takes the form of a futuristic detective novel. In the end, however, it is a meditation on the nature of totalitarian regimes, on the transition to democracy after the end of such regimes, and on the power of language to create and define reality. Ricardo Piglia combines his trademark avant-garde aesthetics with astute cultural and political insights into Argentina’s history and contemporary condition in this conceptually daring and entertaining work.

The novel follows Junior, a reporter for a daily Buenos Aires newspaper, as he attempts to locate a secret machine that contains the mind and the memory of a woman named Elena. While Elena produces stories that reflect on actual events in Argentina, the police are seeking her destruction because of the revelations of atrocities that she—the machine—is disseminating through texts and taped recordings. The book thus portrays the race to recover the history and memory of a city and a country where history has largely been obliterated by political repression. Its narratives—all part of a detective story, all part of something more—multiply as they intersect with each other, like the streets and avenues of Buenos Aires itself.

The second of Piglia’s novels to be translated by Duke University Press—the first was Artifical Respiration—this book continues the author’s quest to portray the abuses and atrocities that characterize dictatorships as well as the difficulties associated with making the transition to democracy. Translated and with an introduction by Sergio Waisman, it includes a new afterword by the author.