Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente (1992) [The Absent City] has received a considerable amount of critical attention in the ten years following its publication, including chapters or sections in three of Duke University Press’s most recent books on Latin American culture and narrative.1 This attention has confirmed Piglia’s prominent position in Latin American (specifically Argentine) contemporary narrative landscape, a position that he established with his 1980 novel Respiracion artificial [Artificial Respiration] and that he has maintained with his most recent novel Plata quemada (1997) [Burnt Silver]. La ciudad ausente’s combination of science fiction and exploration of the aftermath of dictatorship, along with its innovative use of a mechanical female narrator, has served as one of the principal focal points in Piglia criticism to date. Francine Masiello opens her analysis of intellectuals and cultural minorities in Argentina with Piglia’s image, commenting that “Piglia, who otherwise has earned considerable respect as one of Argentina’s main intellectual forces, obliges us in this recent novel to think of the ways in which women are transformed by a technological culture in order to serve the political and esthetic projects of men” (239). Masiello’s 1994 characterization of machine technology as a masculine tool for the transformation of women is contested to some degree by Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s article in which she reads the image in a much more positive light: “The gendered machine’s role is powerful, a symbol of possibility, of resistance. Stories create identities. To speak the horror is to resist, to create languages that deconstruct ideas of individuality… She is all the stories, and she is the teller of all the stories. Technology is the storyteller” (7).2