One of the narrator’s girlfriends describes a dream she had about an animal that turned out to be her father and devoured her. Then she found herself in a mud pit attacked by a wild boar that turned out to be the narrator. Her dream reminds him of some ideas vaguely recollected from Freud, though he doesn’t believe they are applicable to her. He explains that he would know what her dream meant with greater certainty if he or any other man had dreamed it. His own dream life seems somewhat impoverished, even to him. He mainly dreams he’s walking around naked.

Twice, though, he dreams of a woman who is his “professor of English.” This comes out of the blue, almost as if it weren’t the character’s dream at all, but the novel’s: a dream of its own translation, fifty-six years after it was published, thirty-nine years after its author’s death. But of course that’s the story I, the woman translating the novel into English, would tell myself.

•

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–86) never said anything about having written a trilogy. But his work has a strange porousness; it welcomes the possibility of being acted upon by history. In 1999, the Argentine novelist Juan José Saer proposed reading three of Di Benedetto’s novels as a Trilogy of Expectation that begins with Zama (1956) and The Silentiary (1964) and concludes with The Suicides (1969). Saer’s proposition has proven convincing to many, though the central characters, time periods, and literary styles of the three works are quite different. While Zama takes some of its prose style and tone from the period it’s set in and, as Roberto Bolaño noted, from Kafka, the two later novels also respond to the French nouveau roman and the existentialism The Suicides wryly alludes to in its epigraph from Camus. Even so, the novels’ parallel structures, situations, themes, and chronological development speak to each other, enrich each other. Over the past decade, the three have several times been published as a single volume.

Don Diego de Zama narrates the first book, whose three sections are titled 1790, 1794, and 1799—and are perhaps echoed in the enigmatic title of Bolaño’s 2666. Don Diego has no notion of the enormous changes to come just beyond that time frame. Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in 1808 would weaken the Spanish Empire’s grasp on South America and lead to successful wars of independence across the continent. Zama’s readers do know that, however, and can read the novel as an ironic prelude to that future. Closer in time, The Silentiary, which takes place in a vague period just after World War II, also offers its own strange prehistory of the present into which it was published in 1964.