Review: Àlvaro Enrigue on Antonio di Benedetto
The slim volumes that may be the greatest works of mid-century Latin American Literature
Juan José Saer said in 1973, when a large part of the fiction written by Antonio di Benedetto had already been published—and ignored—“Zama is not only superior to most of the novels written in Spanish in the last thirty years, no good Latin American novel is superior to Zama.”
The affirmation was so bold that it had the flavor of a provocation: it implied that the book of an unknown journalist from the provincial city of Mendoza, Argentina, was as important as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, or Mario Vargas Llosa’s Time of the Hero. Those novels, by then, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in many languages.
It was also visionary. While the grand figures of Latin American writing in the fifties and sixties stand today in the marbled mausoleum of mandatory college reading, di Benedetto’s three short novels written in the same period—Zama (1956), The Silentiary (1964), and The Suicides (1969)—are alive, enigmatic little books. Still printed by an Argentine independent publisher, they zigzag from hand to hand among young writers all over the continent. None of these would claim to be influenced by Carlos Fuentes or Alejo Carpentier, while di Benedetto, who wrote to zero acclaim in his time, sustains his condition as a literary secret handshake. An admirer of Zama or The Suicides is a reader who can be taken seriously.
Esther Allen has devoted the last decade to translating from Spanish these three short novels–all of them published in English by New York Review Books. The task is just finished with the arrival of The Suicides in bookstores and indicates, I suppose, an arduous effort, magnificently achieved. Di Benedetto’s style was laconic and translucid, brutally efficient, but it was also millimetrically precise, fortified with the bricks of an incomparable diction.
If Julio Cortázar’s Spanish was playful and Borges’s elegant, di Benedetto’s is deep. One has the feeling, while reading him, that he used the whole Spanish language to describe with meticulous precision, for example, the gestures of a man who gets carried away by the violence of a fight in the boxing ring, or the small physical and verbal contortions that reveal that a woman has finally understood that she lost years of her life dating an egotist. Both of these scenes appear in The Suicides. In the second one, the woman says “good night,” and the reader understands, without the narrator saying it, that a years-long relationship has reached a breaking point.
This extraordinary diction, put to use with painstaking attention to the most minimal acts and gestures of his characters, has a function in di Benedetto’s novels. An action described in its entirety, no matter how important it looks for the person who is executing it, is a demonstration of its metaphysical irrelevance. If we look closely enough, nothing leads to anything better, and no action makes much sense.
Whoever has read Zama knows that the novel is a meditation on how one of the biggest of all epic enterprises in modern history—the occupation of the Americas—was fundamentally a bureaucratic operation. And how trying to avoid a Kafkaesque destiny to find an adventurous true self could only lead to pain for the colonists who dared to turn their backs on the European-style city. In The Silentiary, a hardly functional adult unable to leave the maternal house finds the noise of the outside world first disturbing and then unbearable—as if life lost all sense when the sacred order of intimacy is broken by exterior influences.
In The Suicides, a journalist who works at large for a news agency is researching a story about a pair of pictures of common people who took their own lives. The assignment arrives during a period in which he is dealing with an emotional tempest related to his journalistic pursuit: his father committed suicide on his thirty-third birthday, he is about to reach the same landmark, and he seems to have lost all interest in his own life.
Di Benedetto was a postwar writer—even when the global north tends to think about Latin America as a territory out of history. He has a place in the local existentialist tradition as important as that of the better-known (in English) Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, and the—sadly—completely ignored Mexican Josefina Vicens. There is in The Suicides, as there is in Zama and The Silentiary, a philosophical muscle; even if none of the books is programmatic, they are objects of beauty that don’t try to prove a thesis. The novel, a delicately written research on suicidal gestures and how they have been interpreted through history, ends up answering the fundamental question asked in Zama and The Silentiary: all human actions are irrelevant, and order is impossible, but irrelevance and chaos, as obscure as they feel, prove that choice exists. For di Benedetto, human lives were devoid of a cardinal sense—all destinies conduct to a lonely death—but this condition is the cornerstone of personal freedom.
Àlvaro Enrigue is the author of five novels, three books of short stories, and one of literary criticism in Spanish. His most recent novel, You Dreamed of Empire, has just come out in English in paperback. His other works available in English include Sudden Death and Hypothermia. He was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.
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Thank you for this introduction to a writer with whom I was unfamiliar.