Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

Other authorsEsther Allen (Translator), Esther Allen (Introduction)

Paperback, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

863.64

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

NYRB Classics (2015), Paperback, 236 pages

Description

"First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, 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. Eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, Don Diego does as little as he possibly can while plotting an 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. Zama's stark, dreamlike prose and spare imagery make every word appear to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member encephalical

How to describe this to someone debating reading it... An unappealing, humorless, self-absorbed narrator with an interminable existence at a dead end job in the middle of nowhere.

It's great.

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LibraryThing member Stbalbach

Zama a well regarded work of Latin American literary fiction from 1956. My background in this area is limited but it reminded me of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians -- there are so many similarities I wonder if it was influenced by Zama. Both concern a middle level official of the Empire

in a remote outpost with themes of colonialism and .. waiting... with promises of action that never quite materialize. I enjoy reading history of true life action. Stories about people who might seek adventures and fail at it is best done in fiction - true stories of that type are not very interesting but in this telling Diego de Zama's failures are to our delight.

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LibraryThing member jrcovey

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 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.

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LibraryThing member MeisterPfriem

Published in 1956 but only now, 60 years later, translated here for the first time into English, I only encounter this writer and this book after seeing the recently released film, (also simply named ‘Zama’; the German translation was published in 2009 under the childish title ‘Zama wartet’

- ‘childish’: as is if him, Zama, ‘waiting’ - although an essential feature of the narrative - is really all what it is about.)

For once, the books description on the back cover (and quoted by amazon) is fair and doesn’t promise too much! I ask myself: what is it that drives Zama on, step by step, in his relentless descent into hell?
The argentine writer Juan José Saer compares the power of the narration to that of L’Étranger. I totally agree! I will re-read Camus’ novel.

Esther Allen has taken great care to choose the appropriate language (so it seems to me - but I cannot judge this); she says in the introduction that she found Samuel Beckett’s voice the most useful in this respect. (VIII-18)

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LibraryThing member stillatim

Solid--I suspect it loses something in translation, through no fault of the excellent Esther Allen, but just because I imagine Benedetto using all kinds of archaic, 18th century Hispanisms (did I make that word up?) I'm surprised by my enjoyment, actually. The first third is about Don Diego's

bursting penis and its fight with his equally bursting self-importance, and it took a bit too much effort to convince myself that we're meant to read all that ironically. The middle third has some unfortunate ghost-story nonsense going on. The final third made me wonder if I should have just read some Cormac McCarthy instead. But, it turns out, those three things all balance each other out. I'd hardly call this a masterpiece of existentialist literature, if only because that sounds to me like a rather back-handed compliment ("comparable to Nausea", says Juan Jose Saer). Rather, file it alongside the better novels of Conrad and Cormac: mannered, manly, and not quite as ironic as it needs to be.

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LibraryThing member colligan

A truly remarkable book. It is hard to understand how this work does not have a more notable reputation nor a wider readership. Di Benedetto presents a first person stream of consciousness narrative of a life in decline. A reader can hear and feel how the character attempts to make sense of the

miasma that he himself creates. Certainly an existential classic written in succinct and yet moving prose. Clearly ahead of its time and a must-read for any person interested in serious literature.

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