The aspiration to offer a history of the future poses a greater challenge to the trilogy’s final volume. While its protagonist loves dystopian sci-fi—the primary elsewhere, besides death, he’s able to imagine escaping to—The Suicides is emphatically set in the present of its own writing and publication, something it underscores with multiple references to contemporary novels and films, and even the date of someone’s suicidal leap from the Eiffel Tower on March 12, 1967.

The sense of immediacy is heightened by the third novel’s several parallels to its author’s biography. Unlike the earlier selves in Zama and The Silentiary, the narrator of The Suicides is a professional writer, a journalist, as was Antonio Di Benedetto, who wrote novels, short stories, and screenplays on the side and made his living working for Los Andes, a local newspaper in his native Mendoza. When Di Benedetto was eleven years old, his father died very suddenly. He was never entirely sure whether the death was a suicide.

Still, this is not what we would call autofiction. There are significant and substantial differences between author and protagonist. When he wrote The Suicides, Di Benedetto was more than a decade older than its central figure and a married man, the father of a daughter, Luci, born in 1961. And his life was moving towards a drama different than anything confronted by this protagonist, though strangely similar to the denouement of The Silentiary. On the day of the 1976 coup that deposed Isabelita, Di Benedetto was arrested and held by the state for more than a year, subjected to torture and mock executions. He was never entirely sure why.

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All three of the trilogy’s novels are narrated by a male protagonist in his midthirties: Christ’s age at crucifixion, Dante’s mezzo del cammin, and Di Benedetto’s age when he wrote Zama. All three narrators are drawn to an elsewhere that will liberate them from their current circumstances. All three erupt into a fistfight with a male rival at a climactic moment. Each work reaches a dramatically inconclusive ending. And in each successive volume, the protagonist’s access to power has waned. Don Diego de Zama, a high-level official of the Spanish Empire, can transform the lives of underlings at will. Nevertheless, he lives in poverty and frustration, ever conscious of his inferior status as an americano, born in the New World, and seething with thwarted ambition and resentment of the authority exercised by the viceregal governor and distant king.