THE ACT OF RECOUNTING.

After opening with autobiographical essays, each volume moves between stories and diary entries, punctuated by surreal encounters between Piglia the author and Renzi the character. Inserting himself into an Argentine literary tradition pioneered by Macedonio Fernández and Jorge Luis Borges - who makes an early appearance in the journals - Piglia refuses to differentiate between genres, instead insisting, as he wrote in his book-length essay The Last Reader, that "every thing can be read as fiction" and, in turn, used as fodder for it. Here is Piglia describing his alter ego, who is in the midst of a long autobiographical soliloquy that explains why he (and by extension, Piglia) became a writer: This vacillation between tedium and intellectual exhilaration takes up much of the first volume of the Diaries and eventually results in Piglia's first book, Invasion, a short story collection full of literary pyrotechnics that would presage his later writing. [Extracted from the article]

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