The road to Ida

The novel seems to us a biography of its author whose second name matches the narrator's name "Emilio Renzí"; especially when we know that Ricardo Piglia himself spent fifteen years teaching at various universities in the United States and did not deny that his novel contains features of his autobiography and his experience in teaching and life in the United States. In the early chapters of the novel, we sense a police framework, as "Emilio" seeks to verify the murder of his colleague "Ida Brown," but during his arduous journey to uncover the mystery of that crime, the novel suddenly shifts from the form of a police novel or autobiography to creating links between Joseph Conrad's novels and the world of a mathematician who retired from the world for twenty years to decide to wage a fierce war against the capitalist system represented by the United States itself.