The Silentiary
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the powerful second installment of Argentine writer Di Benedetto's Trilogy of Expectation (after Zama), a nameless narrator is tormented by sounds. At home, in the street, or during rare trips to the circus or during philosophical enquiries with his oddball friend Besarión, the narrator is plagued by the sound of engines, radios, a madman who howls like a monkey, and other more "metaphysical noises." To offset these disturbances, he begins writing a crime novel with himself as the detective. But who will the victim be? And who are the killers? As the borders between life and fiction begin to blur, he risks exchanging the role of author for that of culprit in a crime he is blind to ("I myself, the author, will remain unaware of who the criminal is. That way the book can be prolonged indefinitely, until the crime it once was about has been entirely forgotten," he narrates). Di Benedetto (1922–1986) recasts the major conflict of the modern world as a war between noise and silence with this sly treatise on an individual's attempts to remain sane in a city where his consciousness is frequently set off-kilter, "in defiance of any lunatic who might pretend otherwise." The result is existential, nervy, and crisply imagined.
