A never-before translated classic of Argentine literature, Zama combines a tale of South American imperial governance at its lowest with mid-20th century existential doubt in prose inspired by magic realism.
Antonio di Benedetto (1922-1986) was an Argentine journalist and the author of five novels, of which Zama is the best known. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal (1952), appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World. Esther Allen has translated Javier Marias, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernandez, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and Jose Marti. She teaches at Baruch College and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003.
"Zama remains the most attractive of Di Benedetto's books, if only
because of the crazy energy of Zama himself, which is vividly
conveyed in Esther Allen's excellent translation." —J. M. Coetzee,
The New York Review of Books
"An ardent fan of Dostoyevsky, Di Benedetto is given to portraying
states of extremity—of obsession, delusion, wild aggression—but
without any nineteenth-century rhetorical overheating. . . Zama has
been described as a work of existentialist fiction, and its
protagonist, alone with a troubled mind, is as much an ambassador
from the twentieth century as a Baroque-era bureaucrat. As with
novels by Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett, the story's
preoccupation is the tension between human freedom and constraining
circumstance . . . . The belated arrival of Zama in the United
States raises an admittedly hyperbolic question: Can it be that the
Great American Novel was written by an Argentinean? It's hard,
anyway, to think of a superior novel about the bloody life of the
frontier." —Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
“[A] haunting novel about solitude and self-destruction that is
both earthly and oneiric. Di Benedetto was influenced by
Dostoyevsky and Kafka. But he also had much to say about the Latin
American condition. . . . In place of baroque magic realism, Di
Benedetto writes in sharp, modern, deceptively simple prose. . . .
he was a bridge between Jorge Luis Borges, with his mental
labyrinths, and Roberto Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean whose work
explored both the condition of the writer and chronic violence in
Latin America.” —Michael Reid, The Economist
"Available in English for the first time, this 1956 classic of
Argentine literature presents a riveting portrait of a mind
deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close. . . . The final
images of the novel are haunting and unforgettable. This
extraordinary novel, whose English translation has been so long in
coming, is a once and future classic." —Publishers Weekly, starred
review
"A surprisingly modern existential portrait of a tortured soul."
—BBC
"[Di Benedetto] has written essential pages that have moved me and
that continue to move me." —Jorge Luis Borges
"Di Benedetto is the rare novelist who doesn’t seek to reconstruct
the past to prove a point. He lives the past, and exposes us to
experiences and forms of behavior that retain all their weirdness."
—Julio Cortázar
"So many great books arrive late, or never, in English. High on the
list is Zama, one of the best books written in Spanish during the
second half of the twentieth century." —Jonathan Blitzer, The
New Yorker's Page Turner blog
"[An] exquisite, new, and much-belated translation of Zama." —Ratik
Asokan, The Nation
"[R]ead it above all for the triumph of its style: Zama holds forth
in deep, stewing paragraphs as pompous as they are incisive. It’s
Sartre by way of J. Peterman, and in Esther Allen’s translation it
still feels unique and alive.” —Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review
Daily
"This year's release of Antonio Di Benedetto’s masterpiece is a
literary event of great importance, and it puts an end to an unjust
historical neglect." —Daniel Saldaña París, Publishers
Weekly
"This is a book that I could see myself reading many times, and
always profiting from, seeing it each time as if was reading a
whole other book. . . . Read it. Zama has been worth waiting 7
years for." —Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading
"Scattered in various corners of Latin America and Spain, [Zama]
had a few, fervent readers, almost all of them friends or
unwarranted enemies. . . . [It is written with] the steady pulse of
a neurosurgeon." —Roberto Bolaño, from his story “Sensini”
"[Zama] has the beauty and force of a classic, but also the
attributes of an overlooked masterpiece. . . . I think that Zama
should be translated into English simply because so many
English-speaking readers and authors haven’t read one of the best
novels of the 20th century. Good books are unique and need no
justification." —Sergio Chejfec, The Quarterly Conversation
"Widely regarded as an existential masterpiece and one of the great
novels of the Spanish language, Zama is Antonio di Benedetto’s most
famous—and, arguably, his best—work. It is, therefore, hard to
explain why this novel, first published in 1956, has never been
translated into English and, more broadly, why this author—who
occupies an important place in Argentina’s narrative tradition—is
not more well known in the English-speaking world. All the more so
because the historical and stylistic incisiveness of Di Benedetto’s
writing make Zama a timeless achievement, as readable today as when
it first came off the presses half a century ago." —The Latin
American Review of Books
"[Zama] is comparable to the great existentialist novels such as La
Nausée and L’Étranger, but I believe that, given the circumstances
in which it was written and the peculiar situation of the person
who wrote it, Zama is in many ways superior to those books." —Juan
José Saer
"The structure of Zama is as precise as it is disturbing. Its three
chapters, with ellipses of several years between them, contain
episodes like entries in an intimate diary that alternate with
assaults on consciousness that can neither remain silent nor lie.
Thus are readers led ever further into the depths, in an
irreparable descent into hell. . . . The book’s shatteringly
audacious conclusion forces us to revise our view of all that has
gone before. Zama teaches us to read in a new way, astonishes us
with the discovery that we know nothing." —Raul Cazorla, El
Varapalo
"Zama, a classic of Argentine literature that has finally made its
way into English (thanks to the years-long work of Esther Allen),
is an existentialist-of-sorts masterpiece." —Lucas Iberico
Lozada, Paste
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