Antonio di Benedetto (1922–1986)

As I’m sure many more English-speaking readers will this year, I decided to read this novel after being absolutely awed by Lucrecia Martel’s film adaptation.

Those of you who have seen the film will know that it employs a number of strategies of disorientation and defamiliarization. It can be a baffling film to understand on first viewing.

Reading the book really did help me understand the film better, but it does have its own narrative ellipses and ambiguities. Relatively speaking, it is show more easier to follow in most respects, but disorientation and dislocation are elements of the text, not wholesale additions of Martel’s film.

It is certainly not a conventional page-turner, as the other reviews here attest, but I found that I couldn’t put it down. This anti/hero has some quite awful aspects to him, but I found myself engaged with his odd, un/romantic half-hearted, ennui-infected quest to be reunited with his wife and family.

I honestly think that I could go through several more rounds of re-viewing the film and re-reading the book before I could get tired of either. It’s wonderful that this English translation finally exists. This is a literary treasure. show less

This is a fascinating story about a very unappealing man. He is completely self-absorbed and continually angry at how he has been treated. He feels abandoned in an administrative position in a remote back-water of colonial 18th century South American Spain. He longs to be posted to Buenos Aries and reunited with his wife and children but years go by and still he remains. He passes his days fantasizing about women - despising himself for being attracted to those he feels racially superior to, show more and spinning a drama around a white woman of equal status. In time, his longing for his family seems to evaporate and he becomes increasingly detached from reality. It is all quite pathetic but following his pain and sadness are irresistible. show less

Don Diego de Zama, a government official representing Spain from his post in South America in the 1790s, is far from home and his family with no hope of returning home or attaining a better position. He grows paranoid, goes months without pay, and oddly stalks women in the street. At first he worries about his distant wife and children, then seems to forget they exist. He demands money and food from people, fathers an illegitimate child and generally treats others badly. His life devolves show more into horror. “The horror of being trapped in absurdity.”

As the years of isolation in his outpost continue, Zama’s mental health deteriorates, and the sense of claustrophobic madness builds in this masterful story. show less

A loathsome yet pitiable character who an administrator for the Spanish empire in the late eighteenth century. Even at his most repugnant (his distaste for women who are not-white, for example) Zama comes off as pitiful; in this way, intentionally or not, Di Benedetto shows the emptiness that underlies prejudice. As a clerk in service of the colonising project, the people who work for empire are presented as wretched, small beings; seen through their perspective, the smallness that they feel show more is projected outward, hardens and takes shape as racism, a certain form of ethnic supremacy, because without that there is really nothing to keep them going. To read this solely as an "exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness" as the jacket copy states is a limited form of reading, in my opinion. There is a particular form of existential despair here that is tied to what Zama has to do for a living. show less