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In post-WWII South America, a struggling writer embarks on a murderous thought experiment to help kickstart his career in this next tale of longing from the author of Zama.
The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in mid-level management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it.
He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.
This is the second of the three novels by Antonio Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication "To the victims of expectation" in the first volume, Zama. Together these three works constitute, in Juan José Saer's words, "one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish."
"[The Silentiary] develops in spare, careful prose and sustains a thread of dry humor in the narrator's self-importance, especially in the pomposity and awkwardness of his expressions (shades of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius Reilly), suggesting the fledgling writer trying his tiny wings. Allen's translation renders these nicely...A strange, amusing novel by a writer well worth investigating." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[P]owerful...Di Benedetto (1922–1986) recasts the major conflict of the modern world as a war between noise and silence with this sly treatise on an individual's attempts to remain sane in a city where his consciousness is frequently set off-kilter, 'in defiance of any lunatic who might pretend otherwise.' The result is existential, nervy, and crisply imagined." - Publishers Weekly
"[The Silentiary] calls to mind Kafka's pregnantly indecipherable novels, but Di Benedetto fills out his quasi-allegorical premise with so many dingy particulars that his narrator seems to experience his universal problem, in what may be the universal way, as a private shame and defeat." - The New Yorker
This information about The Silentiary was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentine journalist and the author of five novels, the most well known being Zama, which is available from NYRB Classics. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal, appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World.
Juan José Saer (1937–2005) was considered one of the most important Latin American authors to come after Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote several novels, a few of which are available in English, including The Regal Lemon Tree and The Witness.
Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto's Zama. Co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she teaches at City University of New York's Graduate Center and Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. In 2006 the French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
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