Roving Eye is the Book Review’s essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.
During the past 50 years, the work of the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto has found its way to readers like water trickling from a blocked stream. Beloved by an almost clandestine coterie of admirers that included Roberto Bolaño, Di Benedetto, who died in 1986, is still largely unknown in the United States.
With the publication in English of THE SUICIDES (New York Review Books, 165 pp., paperback, $16.95), the third novel of what can loosely be called a trilogy, this may be about to change. All three books have now been masterfully translated by Esther Allen, who has managed to capture the humor, the sobriety and the oscillations between realism and mental fragmentation that constitute the essence of Di Benedetto’s fiction.
No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one’s modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms.
There is some Kafka and Gogol in his comic tragedies, and some Dostoyevsky in his characters’ furious nihilism, but the atmosphere of his fiction is unlike anyone else’s. His protagonists are aggrieved, frustrated and emotionally trapped. They comb through their psyches with claws, always in the first person. They are repellent and charismatic, often at the same time. And they tell their stories with brio: Curious and well-read, they are ingenious weavers of philosophical riffs designed to shield themselves from the curse of futility.
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