When Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish émigré and writer, decided to leave Buenos Aires and return to his home country, in 1963, a group of friends and literati went to see him off at the city’s port. Years before, Gombrowicz had taken a cruise liner to visit South America; the Second World War began while he was on the trip, and he decided to wait in Buenos Aires until things calmed down a little. He ended up staying for a quarter of a century. Living precariously, often in poverty, Gombrowicz accrued a circle of admirers and followers in Argentina, some of whom helped translate his writings into Spanish. Despite his obscurity—fame arrived belatedly, near his death—those closest to Gombrowicz were sure of his genius. The mood on the day of his departure was desolate. When the steamer unmoored and began to bob away, Gombrowicz shouted his last piece of advice to those onshore. “Kill Borges!” he said.

Ricardo Piglia, the great Argentine writer who died in January, was fond of this anecdote, which he occasionally recited in interviews. Like any ambitious writer working in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, he understood the peculiar burden and gift of laboring under the shadow of Jorge Luis Borges—the master who, according to a famous remark by an Argentine critic, is “bigger than Argentine literature.” The anecdote also contains the traces of Piglia’s own fictions. In a career that spanned four decades, during which he became one of Latin America’s most distinctive literary voices, he often wrote about displaced loners, failed geniuses, persuasive paranoiacs, and conspirators—many of them, like Gombrowicz, washed ashore by the forces of history and surrounded by intense, loyal admirers.

Piglia’s first novel and masterpiece, “Artificial Respiration,” begins with the story of a young novelist named Emilio Renzi, a Piglia alter ego who also appears in other works. When the book opens, he has just published his first work: an autobiographical tale about a mysterious uncle who fled the city and his family for reasons that are not entirely clear. Flattered or provoked by the book, the uncle writes to his nephew, and the two begin a correspondence (“No one ever made good literature out of family stories,” the uncle warns). He has set up in a small town on the Uruguayan border, he explains, where he spends his time teaching adolescents about the country’s history and playing chess in the evenings. His regular hangout is a place called the Social Club. There, melancholy, megalomaniac expatriates dawdle—a bankrupt Russian aristocrat, a Polish intellectual who once met James Joyce, in Zurich. The uncle’s letters are beguiling and learned, laced with rich literary and philosophical commentary. But a sense of dread pervades them. He might soon have to leave the border town. “Some setbacks have forced me to change my plans,” he writes, with typical vagueness. He is working on a very important project. His nephew might soon have to pick up where he leaves off.

Piglia was born in 1940 in Adrogué, a small municipality in the province of Buenos Aires. His father, a committed supporter of Juan Domingo Perón, was forced to flee the town and move with his family to Mar del Plata when the army overthrew the President, in 1955. “Artificial Respiration” was published in 1980, during another military dictatorship, after a coup that overthrew the President at the time, Isabel Perón, Juan Domingo’s third wife. These events suffuse the book—all the more so because they are never mentioned. Marcelo Maggi, the protagonist’s uncle, is always ready to leave town, and his elliptical style seems to be more than an aesthetic choice: he fears being surveilled and intercepted.

Maggi’s crucial project is to decipher the papers and letters of Enrique Ossorio, an obscure man who lived in the nineteenth century and who happens to be the great-grandfather of the uncle’s ex-wife. Ossorio was once the private secretary of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and was also a member of an underground group of intellectuals who conspired to bring his boss down—from Rosas’s office, he wrote letters in code to his comrades. The group is disbanded, but Ossorio is not found out; he retains his position, then decides to go into exile anyway. The other conspirators and exiles don’t understand his decision and begin to fear him—they believe he is a double agent. Ossorio, rejected, becomes disillusioned with politics and begins to live the life of a nomad, moving around to different countries. Was he a spy or a con man? Was he a schizophrenic or a visionary? A patriot?

Ossorio eventually passes through southern Brazil, where he “devotes himself to writing poetry and contracting syphilis”; then he goes on to Chile, where he gives private philosophy classes. (“His only student is a Jesuit priest.”) There, he works on the “Encyclopedia of American Ideas,” a project that he unsuccessfully tries to pitch to other exiled intellectuals. He spends some time in San Francisco and Sacramento, attracted by the lure of the gold rush; he makes a fortune, then moves to Boston, where he befriends Nathaniel Hawthorne. Finally, he ends up in Brooklyn, in a small, dreary place on the banks of the East River, and begins to write an ambitious utopian novel. (Some things, apparently, never change.) His writing grows stranger over time. After he returns to South America, with his gold and his papers clutched close to his body, he kills himself, leaving the writings behind.

The scope of Ossorio’s peripatetic life reflects Piglia’s vast literary ambition—he tries, in his work, to include everything. He is comfortable in different traditions, moving from the hooks of hardboiled American prose (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett) to Continental rambling (Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser), with scattered nods to the local canon (Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernández—and Borges, of course). The first half of “Artificial Respiration” is local in its references, but the second half is told by one of Maggi’s close friends, the Polish intellectual Tardewski (a stand-in for Gombrowicz). A once promising student of Wittgenstein, Tardewski elaborates a ridiculous—and ridiculously convincing—theory that Kafka bumped into the aspiring painter Adolf Hitler at a café in Prague early in the twentieth century.

Piglia died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that forced him to start dictating his longtime project, “The Diaries of Emilio Renzi.” He won prizes and was celebrated by critics in Latin America and Spain, but his fame seems circumscribed. The only American obituary was published on Princeton University’s Web site (Piglia taught literature there for more than a decade); no obituaries appeared in the U.K. The English translation of “Artificial Respiration” came out in 1994, in an edition by Duke University Press, fourteen years after the original version. Even in Latin America, something cultish remains about his figure. Like the theories of the enigmatic heroes in his books, his writing seems to attract intense loyalists, and there is usually a feeling of possessiveness among them. (In Piglia’s fiction, a writer always is a little like a cult leader. Piglia himself fits that rule.)

The first time I read “Artificial Respiration,” I was living in a cramped studio on a busy street in Buenos Aires. Soot rose from the street in the mornings and stuck to the windows. My savings dwindled. One morning, I felt dizzy and went to the doctor, who prescribed me some pills. They made my scalp tingle; they also made me feel as though everything I read was a revelation. Notes and scraps of paper dotted with exclamation points covered the floor and kitchen counter. In that strange moment, the identification I felt with Piglia’s book was total: its secretive, restless atmosphere matched the way I was living.

This year, reading the novel in a more sober state, I was struck by its prescience. The noirish atmosphere, the convergence of storytelling and vigorous literary criticism, the underground cliques of poets and intellectuals, the restless exiles—all this is a blueprint for the kind of fiction that dominated the Latin American scene in later years, the sort of writing that found its way to foreign readers through the works of Roberto Bolaño. But it is the premise of conspiracy as a rule, central to all of Piglia’s work, that feels most prophetic. Surveillance is so ubiquitous that it is now almost taken for granted; warring Internet cliques each present their own version of reality. In South Korea, an aide is shown to possess subterranean powers over the personal life of the country’s leader; in Brazil, a business magnate meets the President in the early hours, secretly tapes him, and then tries to bring the government down; in the U.S., the former director of the F.B.I. is called upon to testify about suspicious ties between the Russians and the President who fired him.