The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it. The final part of this ‘trilogy of expectation’ is, as it should be, a glorious anticlimax.
Zama, set at the end of the 18th century, is about an overlooked minor official stationed in remote Paraguay– neither native nor properly Spanish, frustrated and solipsistic. The narrator of The Silentiary (set in the 1950s) is overwhelmed by noisiness, unable to choose which of his acquaintances will be the victim of his unwritten murder mystery. In The Suicides a reporter in the late 1960s is commissioned to write a piece on suicides, particularly those whose eyes were open in post-mortem photographs. He is approaching the same age as his father was when he committed suicide – ‘on a Friday afternoon’, a detail both precise and oblique. He chafes at having to work with a photographer, Marcela, whom he describes as ascetic but for whom he has clearly stifling feelings.
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