The Suicides

(Paperback)

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A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicideswhich then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itselfin this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedettos Trilogy of Expectation.

A reporters 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 hes 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 himalso a womansnaps 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 widows 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 Benedettos Trilogy of Expectation, called one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish by Juan Jos Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogys 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.

Author Bio

Antonio di Benedetto (19221986) 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 ms . . . 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 Cortzar, and Roberto Bolao.

Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedettos 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.