Cover

Biographical notes

ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO (1922–1986) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He 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. He went on to write the novels Zama, The Silentiary, and The Suicides (all three published as NYRB Classics), which make up his Trilogy of Expectation; Sombras, nada más, his final novel, was published in 1985. 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 Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Roberto Bolaño. In 1976, Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s military dictatorship; after his release in 1977 he went into exile in Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984, where he died less than two years later.

ESTHER ALLEN received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama. A cofounder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she teaches at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography. In 2006 the French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Her essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, and other publications.

Title Page

THE SUICIDES

ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO

Translated from the Spanish by by

ESTHER ALLEN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Dedication

Tous les hommes sains ayant songé a leur propre suicide…

Todos los hombres sanos han pensado en su suicidio alguna vez.

Every sane man has thought about committing suicide at some point.

—ALBERT CAMUS

First Part

DAYS WEIGHED DOWN WITH DEATH

MY FATHER took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.

Tía Constanza mentioned the coincidence, discreetly but tactlessly. I forgot all about it. Until today, when you might say it came looking for me.

At the agency, the boss said, “This could be your chance.”

Without asking permission, he put three photos on my desk and explained my task: to figure out what he’d noticed about them.

“What do you see?”

I took it he was hoping for a display of some exceptional deductive prowess. Leaning forward, I scrutinized the photos. Each showed a human body, fully clothed, lying on the ground. “I see that all three are dead,” I said.

“That’s not a particularly clever response.”