The Suicides
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A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides--which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself--in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto's Trilogy of Expectation.
A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds.
The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto's Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolaño and deemed "one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction" by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the "Dirty War."
About this Author
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 (NYRB Classics) was his first novel; it was followed by The Silentiary (NYRB Classics), The Suicides, and Sombras, nada más . . . 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 Cortázar, and Roberto Bolaño.
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.
Reviews
"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
"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."Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. 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
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