Book, Happy years: the diaries of Emilio Renzi 2[LS]

The second volume of the diaries of Emilio Renzi, Ricardo Piglia's alter ego, offers an intelligent journey full of anecdotes about Latin American literature from the 1960s and 1970s. If in the previous volume, Formative Years, we witnessed the first and decisive steps of the beginning writer, here his career is already developing at full steam in the world of Argentine literature, with the direction of a magazine, editorial work, articles, courses and conferences. Renzi becomes “Piglia”, a double for an intellectual who starts to gain more and more importance. In these engaging pages, full of insights and lots of brilliance, Piglia's obsession with literature materializes in ideas and sketches of stories and novels, readings, meetings with renowned writers — Borges, Puig, Roa Bastos and many others — and generational colleagues . Also special are the countless reflections on writing and the work of classic authors and novelists. And there are still the trips, the intimate and loving life, the Argentina of those convulsive years: the death of Perón, the emergence of guerrilla groups, the military coup that would shatter the intellectual world of Buenos Aires.