(Ebook) The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen (translation), Juan José Saer (introduction) ISBN 9781681375632, 168137563X, 2021012496

(Ebook) The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen (translation), Juan José Saer (introduction) ISBN 9781681375632, 168137563X, 2021012496

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 choosing a victim among the people he knows & 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 & 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.”

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Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentine journalist & author of five novels, of which Zama is the most well known. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal (1952), appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World.

Esther Allen on Twitter, 4/5/24:“I declined the PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, in solidarity with the 1300+ writers who've decried @PENamerica's silence on the genocidal murder of Palestinians, & with the @united_PEN's fight to maintain free speech for PEN employees,”