The Silentiary
Antonio Di Benedetto, Tr. Esther Allen
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Silentiary
Antonio Di Benedetto, Tr. Esther Allen
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The first part of the novel delicately balances the comedy of neurosis with a study of the increasing suffering and alienation of the narrator, who recognizes his contradictions...but not his tendency toward self-importance.
Even without a real crime, The Silentiary is in some ways built up that way. It is as much a novel about process as anything else: living, experiencing—and writing, even if the narrator isn't actually writing.
The books [in the Trilogy of Expectation] have a spiritual kinship with Samuel Beckett’s postwar trilogy of monologue novels in their deadpan rendering of comic futility and monomania. The narrator’s voice is disturbed and disassociated, yet, somehow, strangely pithy and clarifying.
Inexplicably ignored and relegated to minor status below fellow Argentines like Borges and Cortázar, di Benedetto is every bit as rewarding and meaningful. The novel’s message about the frustrations of an individual desperately but ineffectively fighting the system is even more relevant today, over half a century after it was written..
... powerful.
It develops in spare, careful prose and sustains a thread of dry humor in the narrator’s self-importance, especially in the pomposity and awkwardness of his expressions (shades of John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly), suggesting the fledgling writer trying his tiny wings. Allen’s translation renders these nicely.