Assumed Name

Argentinian writer and critic Piglia (Artificial Respiration) borrows shamelessly from Borges and other postmodern writers in this eponymous novella and five accompanying short stories-now translated 20 years after their first appearance in Spanish. But that borrowing is a conscious aesthetic choice that underscores a recurring theme in this cerebral collection: originality is a myth. Consonant with this theme, seemingly separate stories-all of which are set in Argentina between the 1950s and the 1970s-touch in tangential ways. ``The End of the Ride,'' for example, focuses on a journalist named Emilio Renzi returning home by a series of indirect train routes to face a host of mysteries surrounding his father's suicide. Renzi then reappears as a minor character in the title novella, which, in turn, focuses on a literary scholar named Ricardo Piglia, who's reconstructing the shadowy circumstances in which an unpublished (and fictional) story by the famous (and actual) Argentinian author Roberto Arlt was written. The tales are thick with inside jokes and references to Argentinian history and culture. Collectively, they try to dissolve the strict divisions between fact and fiction, reality and dreaming and, ultimately, as far as a reader is concerned, literature and criticism. (Oct.)