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The Suicides

The Suicides

by Antonio Di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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The February 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds.

The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolaño and deemed “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the “Dirty War.”

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681378862
Pages: 176
Publication Date:

Praise

In its cruel melancholy, The Suicides gives a new turn of the screw to the work of a writer who, said Borges, has produced ‘essential pages that have moved me and continue to move me.’
—Alberto González Toro

In The Suicides [Antonio Di Benedetto’s fiction] suffers a deliberate ‘disintegration’ of language into a neutral term of writing . . . the ‘degree zero’ of literature which, according to Barthes, achieves a style of absence that is almost an absence of style: ‘This art has the very structure of suicide.’
—Augusto Roa Bastos

The novel’s success lies in the author’s light touch with weighty themes, which he layers into the narrative with snippets of philosophical writing on suicide from Confucius, Nietzsche, and others. This is brilliant.
—Publishers Weekly

Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I found the wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it. The final part of this ‘trilogy of expectation’ is, as it should be, a glorious anticlimax....Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. Like so many in the NYRB imprint, the book is thrillingly singular."Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. It perfectly dramatizes Nietzsche’s aphorism that the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one successfully gets through many a bad night.
— Stuart Kelly, The Spectator

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