Di Benedetto packs a remarkably thick weave of ideas and allusions into his seemingly restrained prose ... Di Benedetto’s suffering was real and not allegorical. Still, its profound senselessness and his ability to survive it make one think of his novels’ compromised heroes, who remain doggedly expectant to their shattered end—for the restoration of bygone glory or the peace of perfect silence.
Di Benedetto’s writings exert a subliminal influence on me: under their spell, time lags, and the world of people and things acquire a blurred, phantasmagoric tenor ... The book’s great virtue is that, using austere and bluntly cryptic prose, it builds the feeling of an unnamed and perhaps unnamable menace dwelling just behind the veil of words and suspends us in a state that doesn’t dissipate when we close its covers—of someone who, rising from a particularly intense nightmare, doesn’t know the extent to which, or even whether, she has woken up.
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.
The novel is written in a laconic, lapidary style ... Like so many in the NYRB imprint, the book is thrillingly singular. It perfectly dramatises Nietzsche’s aphorism that the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one successfully gets through many a bad night.
Di Benedetto never loses control of his story. The Suicides may be too fragmented to fit the bill as a police procedural, its narrator too much of an everyman to muster comparison to Philip Marlowe. Simply put, it’s a novel of expectation and of understatement.
With his delicate humour and control, Antonio di Benedetto persuasively explores the etiology of contemporary masculine dysfunction – that is, as a crisis of social utility.
Captivating ... 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.
