The epigraph to Zama—“A las víctimas de la espera,” which I’ve translated as “To the victims of expectation”—gives the posthumously conceived trilogy its title. The two earlier novels revolve around a dissatisfied man’s expectation of some improvement in his life. The expectation that permeates the third book is more generalized; it seems to envelop everyone. Adriana, one of the two suicide cases the narrator sets out to investigate, suffers from the madness that afflicts the authors of novels, a sense of “not being one individual: of multiplying herself: she was everyone else.” She’s gone to great effort to stage her suicide so as to cast blame for it on her young niece. Perhaps the entity she’s actually accusing is the implacable march of time that has turned her own earlier self into what she is now. For his part, the narrator blames her family for ignoring her strange behavior, which was, he decides, a plea: “Help me.” “Love me.” “Don’t leave me alone.” “Don’t let me die.”

Adriana was crazy, several observers agree (though Bibi disputes this term), but no one thinks the male suicide Juan Tiflis was mentally unbalanced. He was a dignified elderly gentleman, drawn in by a powerful sect of wealthy death-resisters until he rejected them by killing himself. (The hand later amputated from his corpse is a remote echo of Don Diego’s severed fingers.) Tiflis’s widow, however—also middle-aged and alone, also done in by time, as the portrait of her younger self that hangs in her tiny apartment shows—is considered a madwoman by her disdainful lawyer. Gender is expectation; every character in The Suicides is formed by gender expectation and is a victim of it, some more than others.