Bøger af Antonio di Benedetto

An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.   Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.   Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides—which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself—in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation.A reporter’s boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, “For the blood, so the red is visible.” All he’s given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead.As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.A photographer assigned to work with him—also a woman—snaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widow’s tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, called “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogy’s final work takes place in a provincial city at the end of the 1960s, which is also when it was written and published, as Argentina plummeted towards the Dirty War. Its protagonist, once again, is a man in his early thirties, stymied and in search of an elsewhere.

Mod slutningen af det 18. århundrede i en fjern spansk koloni i det daværende Paraguay venter don Diego de Zama på brev fra kongen. Han vil forflyttes til Buenos-Ayres og lægge sin triste tilværelse på den yderste udpost bag sig.Men årene går, og brevet kommer ikke. Ensom og overladt til sin elendige skæbne ædes han langsomt op af stolthed, begær, dovenskab og paranoide fantasier.don Diego de Zama er på en og samme tid en historisk beretning om kolonialismen i Latinamerika og et stående portræt af menneskets begrænsninger og grimhed, når det presses til det yderste. Romanen betragtes i den spansktalende verden som en af de største fortællinger gennem tiden.Om forfatterenSærligt inspireret af russiske Fjodor Dostojevskijs karakterskildringer og eksistentielle temaer skrev Antonio Di Benedetto både novellesamlinger og romaner. Her udmærker don Diego de Zama sig som et hovedværk – ikke blot i forfatterskabet, men i moderne latinamerikansk litteratur. I 1976 blev Di Benedetto under det argentinske militærdiktatur fænglset og tortureret, men løsladt igen året efter, hvorpå han drog i spansk eksil frem til 1984. Hændelsen peger på forunderlig vis bagud og spejler nogle af de centrale og tidløse motiver i don Diego de Zama, der udkom første gang på spansk i 1956.Med Ane-Grethe Østergaards oversættelse udgives romanen her for første gang på dansk.“Med en vis hyppighed er jeg standset ved ensomhedens og hjælpeløshedens billede, det absurdes dobbeltansigt, den angstfyldte ventetid, sjælens mysterier (ét er evnen til at elske), ødelæggelsens og ondskabens skikkelser, dødens tiltrækningskraft, muren eller tomheden i intetheden. Da jeg skrev don Diego de Zama, bekymrede jeg mig meget om ånden i samtiden.”- Antonio Di Benedetto“don Diego de Zama er noget af det bedste og mest ubehageligt sande, jeg har læst. Den forstyrrer og besætter sin læser – lige fra den ikoniske indledning til den håbløse ende.” - Jonas Victor Damgaard-Mørch, Forlaget Multivers

In post-WWII South America, a struggling writer embarks on a murderous thought experiment to help kickstart his career in this next tale of longing from the author of Zama. The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in mid-level management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.This is the second of the three novels by Antonio Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication "To the victims of expectation" in the first volume, Zama. Together these three works constitute, in Juan José Saer's words, "one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish."