Antonio Di Benedetto was born in the minor Argentine city of Mendoza in 1951 and remained there for much of his life. He made his living as a screenwriter and journalist. He rejected the dominant literary scene in Buenos Aires. Despite acclaim from Jorge Luis Borges and other contemporaries, Di Benedetto’s five novels and dozens of short stories saw little mainstream success. He was a modest man, benignly conservative, with a wife and children. But on the first day of the Argentine military junta in 1976, as if to add insult to the injury of his obscurity, Di Benedetto was detained, imprisoned, tortured, and then, as suddenly as he was detained, released. He died without knowing the charge. 

His life story reads like one of his novels. In Di Benedetto’s fictional universe, as in Kafka’s, the attempt to avoid punishment is a crime in itself. Don Diego de Zama, the protagonist of his 1956 novel Zama, volunteers for a military expedition in the hopes of a promotion out of his backwater post, and ends up alone in the desert with his hands cut off. The unnamed narrator of 1963’s The Silentiary, searching throughout the novel for the silence he needs to begin his book, is finally imprisoned in a cell beside a buzzsaw. Di Benedetto’s narrators—vain, self-loathing, ridiculous men, given to cruelty and self-pity—invite the very fate they try to escape. 

The Suicides, first published in 1966, has been reissued by New York Review Books in a long-awaited translation by Esther Allen. In it, a reporter investigates a series of suicides while also “awaiting” his own. He reports on the suicides of two teenage boys, a spinster, and a wealthy, venerable man. He reads about historical suicides, literary suicides, the suicides of animals. Behind all of this is the fact that the reporter’s own father committed suicide on his thirty-third birthday. Thirty-two when the book opens, the narrator looks toward his own birthday wondering if he will do the same. 

The Suicides is a detective novel wherein the detective attempts, through rational deduction, to explain the most irrational of acts: self-annihilation. Reporting, researching, and observing, the narrator searches for the story. There is the story of the two teenage boys, who entered into a suicide pact. There is the story of the unmarried woman, who may have heard voices. There is the story of the old, rich man in a secret society. And there is the story of the reporter investigating suicides while anticipating his own. “I wondered what I would do,” the narrator asks himself, again and again. For him, suicide is a passive act, imposed upon him bya self he does not understand. He wonders about his approaching fate as if reading his own life in a book. 

Critics sometimes group the work of writers into thematic trilogies, particularly when the writer is dead and unable to resist, but in Di Benedetto’s case, the classification works well enough. The Suicides is considered the last in a “Trilogy of Expectation” that begins with Zama and continues with The Silentiary, and although the unnamed narrator of The Suicides lacks his predecessors’ dynamism, comedy, and the grandeur of their misery, he shares their predicament. Like Zama or the narrator of The Silentiary, the protagonist of The Suicides is dogged by lust, tormented by others’ and his own expectations of himself, somewhere when he’d rather be elsewhere, and around thirty-three years old—the age of Christ at his crucifixion.

The narration of The Suicides is bare and dispassionate. Paragraphs consist of one or two sentences. Sentences consist of one or two clauses. There is little lyricism and the metaphors are few; there are no passages of particularly pleasing writing. Describing an attempted suicide, Di Benedetto writes: 

He’s not dead. He filled his mouth with sleeping pills and swallowed all he could. But for no particular reason his daughter came in just then. She went and got salt and put lots of it in a glass of water, and though the old man twisted away, kicking and moaning, she forced him to drink it. It made him vomit. Before she got married, the daughter was a cleaning woman in a hospital and learned a lot there.

A clear sensibility is hard to detect here. There is a touch of irony (“for no particular reason”), a slight turn to colloquial speech (“learned a lot there”), but little in the way of a personality or style. The sentences move so dryly they seem to chafe. The present tense provides no future from which the narrator looks back; he can only hurtle terribly forward. Like Beckett’s late narrators, he speaks as if his voice is the only thing between himself and the void. 

The Suicides lacks the fullness and comedy of Zama, but it does have a particular building power of its own. As Zama’s comparatively lengthy, complex sentences embodied that protagonist’s solipsism, so too does our narrator’s rationality reveal him. He clings to facts as if to life itself. The effect of these short, clean sentences is not callousness, as in crime fiction, or disillusion, as in the novels of the French existentialists who inspired Di Benedetto, but extreme vulnerability. In the dryness of his voice, his attempt to not give an inch to sentiment or irrationality, is the desperation of a man trying to explain his father’s suicide and what may well be his own. 

Animating The Suicides is the central question of all of Di Benedetto’s work: Are we born fated to inherit our punishment like a father’s oversized suit? Are we damned to begin with? It is his narrators’ quality of self-consciousness, turning endlessly back on themselves until annihilation is as good as salvation, that makes Di Benedetto’s novels so effective. In the narrator’s attempt to avoid his fate, and the destruction that this self-narrative at once avoids and invites, The Suicides echoes Di Benedetto’s other novels. It also echoes Di Benedetto’s own life. 

Di Benedetto wrote another novel and dozens of stories after his release and subsequent exile. These stories are dark and more fantastical, but deal largely with the same material as the trilogy: a Gaucho who spends years in his saddle in imitation of the Christian stylites, a self-described “normal man” who finds himself compelled to assume the place of a panhandler’s dog. Yet it is his earlier books, in their quality of prophecy, that best articulate what would happen to Di Benedetto. Zama, The Silientiary, and The Suicides all seem to anticipate Di Benedetto’s fate as their narrators anticipate their own. When Don Diego de Zama, twenty years before his creator’s arrest, says, “It was as if my guilt were an inheritance and had little to do with me,” we have the eerie sense of Di Benedetto writing his own future. 

The Suicides 
Antonio Di Benedetto
Translated by Esther Allen
New York Review Books 
$16.95 | 176 pp.