Antonio Di Benedetto
Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–86) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He 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. He went on to write the novels Zama, The Silentiary, and The Suicides (all three published as NYRB Classics), which make up his Trilogy of Expectation; Sombras, nada más, his final novel, was published in 1985. 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 Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Roberto Bolaño. In 1976, Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s military dictatorship; after his release in 1977 he went into exile in Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984, where he died less than two years later.
The Suicides, recently published by NYRB Classics, completes Antonio di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. The nameless narrator, living in an unspecified Latin American city, waits in expectation of existential crisis or epiphanic revelation. His editor puts three photos of suicides on his desk and the narrator concludes that each victim saw something revelatory before the end. He wants to venture to the heart of these tragedies, perhaps even see what they saw, and enlists the aid of a partner named Marcela in his investigation. His question to her, at the end of the excerpt you are about to read, is whether or not she is capable of photographing an earthquake—not the effects, not the people fleeing tremors, but the earthquake in itself. In many ways this is the core distinction in The Suicides as a whole: how do we apprehend a process without mistaking it for a thing, or a series of things? How do we comprehend any of the events in any of our lives, or in the lives of those we love, in a snapshot rather than as an accumulation of all the decisions that brought the person to that point? The particulars drop away and the reader is left with an odd amalgam of page turner and quiet meditation on the human condition, all delivered with the tone of a Godard film.