The Silentiary [Paperback]

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 middle 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 choos- ing 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.

The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation” in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.” The Silentiary is an urban novel, but the city manifests almost exclusively through sound, which tortures the narrator with its crushing omnipresence. . . . Agency and its destruction is The Silentiary’s, indeed the entire Trilogy of Expectation’s, central drama: What can an individual do against the abstract and inescapable exhaustion of the present? . . . Di Benedetto was a poet of individuals in conflict with the historical conditions into which they were born, infected with a will to live that thel³R