The Suicides

“Di Benedetto can be seen as a bridge from the magic of García Márquez to the realism of Bolaño and the generation of Latin American writers that succeeded him.” —Michael Greenberg, New York Times

“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.’“—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“In its cruel melancholy, The Suicides gives a new turn of the screw to the work of a writer who, said Borges, has produced ‘essential pages that have moved me and continue to move me.’” —Alberto González Toro

“In The Suicides [Antonio Di Benedetto’s fiction] suffers a deliberate ‘disintegration’ of language into a neutral term of writing … the ‘degree zero’ of literature which, according to Barthes, achieves a style of absence that is almost an absence of style: ‘This art has the very structure of suicide.’” —Augusto Roa Bastos

““Di Benedetto’s narrators cannot take hold of anything, even their own callousness. They falter; they flicker; they do not coalesce…It is hard to imagine a more prescient meditation on the dizzying senselessness of suffering.” —Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum

“The novel’s success lies in the author’s light touch with weighty themes, which he layers into the narrative with snippets of philosophical writing on suicide from Confucius, Nietzsche, and others. This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly

“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 found the 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…. Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. Like so many in the NYRB imprint, the book is thrillingly singular. It perfectly dramatizes Nietzsche’s aphorism that the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one successfully gets through many a bad night.” —Stuart Kelly, The Spectator

Antonio di Benedetto (1922-1986) began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo animal. Zama was his first novel; it was followed by The Silentiary, The Suicides, and Sombras, nada mas … Over the course of his career he received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments, and he earned the admiration of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Roberto Bolano.

Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama. A cofounder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program.

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