Zama, Antonio Di Benedetto
Zama, Antonio Di Benedetto
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Zama

Author: Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen

Narrator: Armando Durán

Unabridged: 7 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/10/2017

Synopsis

Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness.First published in 1956, Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

About Antonio Di Benedetto

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo Animal. Zama was his first novel, followed by El Silenciero, Los Suicidas, and Sonbras, Nada Más. Over the course of his career, he received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments, and he earned the admiration of such well-known writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Roberto Bolaño. In 1976 Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s military dictatorship. After his release in 1977, he went into exile in Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984 and died less than two years later.

About Esther Allen

Esther Allen is an essayist and translator from Spanish and French. Among her translations are Horacio Verbitsky’s The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, José Marti: Selected Writings, and José Manuel Prieto’s Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two translation fellowships, one of them for Zama, and the French government has named her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Baruch College.

About Armando Durán

Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit

In a way Zama is an inverse of The Castle by Franz Kafka – the protagonist is inside and he desperately strives to get out. Doctor Don Diego de Zama!… The forceful executive, the pacifier of Indians, the warrior who rendered justice without recourse to the sword. Zama, who put down the native rebelli......more

Goodreads review by s.penkevich

Something more is always expected. ‘To the victim of expectations,’ begins Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama in its epigraph. The Argentine masterpiece, first published in 1956 and, in 2016, made available in an exacting English translation by Esther Allen that retains the precise and often surrealistic pr......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

”The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.” Samuel Beckett from Molloy, quoted from the intro by Esther Allen. Don Diego de Zama is going mad. Paranoia is a cloak that he swings around his shoulders li......more

Goodreads review by °°°·.°·..·°¯°·._.· ʜᴇʟᴇɴ Ροζουλί Εωσφόρος ·._.·°¯°·.·° .·°°°

«Σάμα», ένα όνομα, ένα ατέρμονο παιχνίδι που βρίθει απο συμβολισμούς, εικόνες, μεταφορές, φανταστικά και φυσικά στοιχεία που εκπορεύονται απο τη γεύση της Αργεντινής. Εικόνες σαγηνευτικές, λεκτικά παιχνίδια και απόλυτη μαθηματική ακρίβεια λόγου, πάντα με οξύμωρη διάθεση και μια αίσθηση έντονης και α......more

Quotes

“The story’s preoccupation is the tension between human freedom and constraining circumstance.” New Yorker

”Read it above all for the triumph of its style…It’s Sartre by way of J. Peterman, and in Esther Allen’s translation it still feels unique and alive.” Paris Review Daily

"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.” New York Review of Books

“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.” Latin American Review of Books

“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.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“How fortunate we are to finally have this classic of twentieth-century Argentine literature in English…Esther Allen’s superb translation captures the remarkable atmosphere and existential anguish of di Benedetto’s masterwork.” National Translation Award Committee

“[Di Benedetto] has written essential pages that have moved me and that continue to move me.” Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Award–winning author

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
  • Best Translated Book Award
  • National Translation Award
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