‘The Suicides' Review: Antonio di Benedetto's Lost Souls

Wall Street Journal

07-02-2025

Though Argentina's cultural hub was in Buenos Aires, the writer Antonio di Benedetto (1922-1986) stayed for most of his life in his birth city of Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes mountains and some 650 miles from the capital. Di Benedetto was far from a recluse: He worked as a journalist and deputy director of a Mendoza newspaper; he wrote novels, short stories and screenplays; and he had a vocal admirer in the country's literary panjandrum Jorge Luis Borges. Even so, it's tempting to interpret his life on the outskirts as an act of self-imposed isolation. Di Benedetto's books are compact, existential allegories of estrangement and longing. They are about misanthropic yet disarmingly vulnerable men who are marooned on the periphery of society—'ready to go,' as one of them thinks, 'and not going.'
Di Benedetto's provincial focus also meant that his intricate, original fiction went underappreciated in his lifetime. It fell to later Latin American writers, the most notable being Chile's Roberto Bolaño, to insist upon his place in the 20th-century canon. In a 1999 essay, the Argentine writer Juan José Saer suggested that three of Di Benedetto's novels—'Zama' (1956), 'The Silentiary' (1964) and 'The Suicides' (1969)—were so thematically similar that they could be considered a trilogy. Though there's no evidence that Di Benedetto contemplated such a thing, the idea stuck. Bringing out new translations of 'Zama' in 2016, 'The Silentiary' in 2022 and, now, 'The Suicides,' NYRB Classics has published this set as the Trilogy of Expectation. All three have been rendered into English with exceptional style and discernment by Esther Allen.
Geography is most like destiny in 'Zama,' the story of a colonial administrator stationed in a remote backwater of Spain's South American empire at the close of the 18th century. Separated from his wife and children, Don Diego de Zama yearns for a favorable posting back to Buenos Aires, which never comes. Biding his time, he pursues a love affair with a great European-born lady, who also eludes him. Following Zama's slow-motion decline from lordly pomp to penury, Di Benedetto produces his most memorable character, a man as piteous as he is foolish, defeated by the world but in recompense granted an insight into the essential anticlimax of existence: 'Everything is possible, I saw, and in the end every possibility can be exhausted.'
Another thwarted soul narrates 'The Silentiary,' which involves a blocked writer's attempt, sometime in the 1950s, to escape the noise of his nameless Latin American city. As he drags his family from lodging to lodging, hauling along a piano that no one is permitted to play, his doomed quest for silence acquires metaphysical overtones, becoming a search for some idealized place 'where everyone sleeps at night.' As in 'Zama,' the story grows increasingly surreal (dreams are prominent in all of Di Benedetto's books), though the writing remains formal and dignified.