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.