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by Antonio Di Benedetto
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 reporter's boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, "For the blood, so the red is visible." All he's given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead.
As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.
A photographer assigned to work with him—also a woman—snaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widow's tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.
The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto's Trilogy of Expectation, called "one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish" by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogy's final work takes place in a provincial city at the end of the 1960s, which is also when it was written and published, as Argentina plummeted towards the Dirty War. Its protagonist, once again, is a man in his early thirties, stymied and in search of an elsewhere.
"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 (starred review)
"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." —The Spectator
This information about The Suicides 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) 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.
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