Name: The Suicides
Price: 16.95 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Antonio Di Benedetto
ISBN: 9781681378862

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.”

“Di Benedetto can be seen as a bridge from the magic of García Márquez to the realism of Bolaño and the generation of Latin American writers that succeeded him.” —Michael Greenberg, New York Times

“Di Benedetto’s books are compact, existential allegories of estrangement and longing. They are about misanthropic yet disarmingly vulnerable men who are marooned on the periphery of society—’ready to go,’ as one of them thinks, ‘and not going.'”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“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

““Di Benedetto’s narrators cannot take hold of anything, even their own callousness. They falter; they flicker; they do not coalesce…It is hard to imagine a more prescient meditation on the dizzying senselessness of suffering.” —Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum

“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. 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

The Suicides

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By Antonio Di BenedettoTranslated by Esther Allen