The Silentiary
The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto, published by New York Review of Books on February 1, 2022, is a work of fiction that delves into the complexities of ambition and creativity in post-WWII South America. Set in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s, the narrative follows a struggling writer who grapples with the challenges of his environment while contemplating a dark thought experiment to ignite his literary career.
Readers will find a story that explores themes of longing and the intersection of personal ambition with moral dilemmas. The protagonist, a young man in middle management, seeks inspiration for his writing by considering a murder among his acquaintances, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. This edition, comprising 176 pages, invites readers to engage with the political and satirical elements woven throughout the narrative, reflecting the author’s broader commentary on societal expectations and individual aspirations.
Official synopsis Publisher
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.”
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