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 suicidies 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.
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.
