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 prose, is a novel of surmounting frustration and failed expectations of a man caged by his social status and position. The theme of restlessly remaining static functions equally as an existential and so

All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.

Entitled Ugarte, it was about a series of moments in the life of Juan de Ugarte, a bureaucrat in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century. Some (mainly Spanish) critics had dismissed it as Kafka in the colonies…

If he clings to the one who no longer is, and to her alone, then he loves a dangerous fantasy. It will lead to sickness and distress, perhaps horror.

Yet another woman felt authorized to furnish me with her protection. I was a fragile man, therefore, and visibly so.

I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.

’ 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 prose, is a novel of surmounting frustration and failed expectations of a man caged by his social status and position. The theme of restlessly remaining static functions equally as an existential and socio-political examination, the struggle between freedom and a constrictive society--self-sabotage--exacerbating a feeling of hopelessness and the ‘’ The reader is treated to a captains seat within the consciousness of Don Diego de Zama in his purgatorial Paraguayan post afar from family in which he can rise no higher. Through the detestable, boastful and pathetic mind of the narrator, the reader rides a tragic tale of male fragility and futility in a new world that shall consume Zama as Benedetto examines the ego as well as the confines and constructs of the outer world that astringe against it.Zama opens with a stark image of a deceased monkey rocking in the waves along the city’s port.Don Diego de Zama begins his tale with an immediate affinity with this stagnant corpse, seeing in it the horrors of his own existence. A few pages later he once again finds a perfect metaphor for his condition in the fate of a species of fish ‘’ Much like in Benedetto’s first book, a loosely connected series of stories aptly titled(Animal World, as collected in the new Nest in the Bones: Stories by Antonio Benedetto ), animal metaphors and nature imagery is employed towards an accruing sense of dread and absurdity such as the narrator ofallowing birds to nest in his skull only to be picked apart from the inside or Zama noticing the fruitless efforts of beasts in the wild.The novel, told in three sections--the final and shortest segment being the most impressive and most brutal--covers a decade of Zama’s life as the 18th century draws to a close. ‘’ sets the tone of what is to follow as Zama schemes for a promotion that will bring him back to the city, back to his wife, back to the limelight of social glory. He has risen quickly and efficiently, holding a position just beneath the local Gobernador while still in the youth of his early thirties, but is held back due to his identity--Zama is a child of the Americas. 18th Century Spanish law decreed that positions of power were to be held only by the true Spanish blood, and even though both Zama’s parents were, his fate of having been born in the colonies marks him. Early on, Zama visits the home of sex workers with other dignitaries who laugh at his insistence on only sleeping with white women, calling him out on his attempt to seem ‘purely Spanish’. This existential dissatisfaction with an identity beyond his control is the root of all his actions and frustrations. Zama spends the novel blaming outside conditions, spiraling into wild fits of rage and paranoia as the world around him seems to plot against him. However, many of his shortcomings are self-inflicted. Zama has an important position that he neglects while stewing over his lusts, haphazardly ruling over murder cases or dismissively making knee-jerk decisions on matters that require much more attention. His inability to act is best personified in a scene where he watches a poisonous spider crawl over the sleeping body of a man he knows. Zama does nothing, just hoping the situation will play out for the best and is horrified to realize he felt no empathy for the man who might be killed but instead just a tepid fascination to see what happens.Much like his titular character, Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986) never achieved fame during his lifetime. Like his narrator, his self-imposed exile in the countryside of Argentina instead of the literary hub of Buenos Aires hindered his rise in status. Imprisoned for speaking out against the military dictatorship of General Videla and the ‘disappearances” that claimed the lives of many leftists during the Dirty War, Benedetto faced the firing squad only to be pardoned moments before, much like his literary hero--and major influence-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky ¹. I found Zama to most bring to mind Hunger by Knut Hamsun , which is interesting to note as Hamsun was inspired by Dostoevsky and in turn influenced Franz Kafka while Benedetto was most influenced by Dostoevsky and Kafka (the latter he had just read in the year proceeding publication of Zama and Kafka’s influence is easily recognizable as having been currently weighing on his mind during the creative process). It seems there is a common denominator functioning within the works of these novels and Zama is another stone to overturn in the discovery of this underlying literary cohesion.As one author often informs upon another, I came to Benedetto through Roberto Bolaño and his story(the opening tale in the collection Last Evenings on Earth ), whose namesake character is based on Benedetto himself. Wiithin the story Bolaño provides a succinct review of the novel Zama--appearing in Sensini asand later Bolaño continues, very astutely addressing the prose as ‘’ While ‘’ is used dismissively, it isn’t altogether inaccurate. Within, we find the caricature of Benedetto as an aging author with a son, Gregorio, who has ‘disappeared’ during the Dirty Wars. The narrator suspects the name as being a nod to Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis . Bolaño was laying much of the groundwork of interpretation for Zama--pronounced in Spanish with a sibilant S like Sama--by playfully making the novel Zama like a literary child lost in the chaos of the mid twentieth century and pointing out that the title is a play of Kafka’s Samsa².Much like Gregor Samsa, Zama is trapped in the horrors of his situation.There is a surmounting nightmarish quality to the second half of Zama as frustrations grow. Zama professes a desire for the ‘reality’ in his world but when they do not meet his expectations they become a living nightmare tinted in paranoia and surreal disappointments. After a particularly hellish scene in which he watches a young girl be trampled to death by a horse and then chases a woman who may or may not be posing as two women to, as he considers, toy with him, Zama wakes and dismisses it all as a fever dream. His refusal to accept the world around him, to accept his station in it, is launching him into a purgatory where freedom is stifled by the human condition and his rage against it is like crying out into a void. ‘’ he asks himself. His inability to step through it becomes a trap of his own design.Benedetto positions the narrative within Zama’s stream of consciousness where we can observe the tides of his moods and hear his inner confessions. There is a wonderful, black humor to the novel that gives reprieve from its almost overwhelming grimey and grimness as Zama self-justifies all his actions in pathetically pompous manners. After assaulting a woman, he grieves not for the cheek he slapped but that he has ‘’ Zama is a detestable character, aggressive yet weak, lustful, prideful and totally unable to temper his own emotions. In effect, he feels very real and it is his ‘realness’ that he has the most difficulty grappling with along with the ‘realness’ of his surrounding world. The woman of the second section warns him through a metaphor of a lover’s claim on a woman:He must come to terms with reality as it is, not as he fantasizes it should be. Zama fails to heed the sagacious warning and continually slips into madness.This madness of his own doing stems from his own male fragility and the assumptions of what a man is and should be in his own culture. In this way, Benedetto manages to craft a novel that is almost a work of feminism. Zama wishes to be the great hero, and when he is on the up he is proud and boastful. ‘’ he cries, or, while drunk thinks ‘’ Along his purgatorial journey, Zama receives the aid of several women, whom he subjects to his debauched lusts. In the first segment, Zama spends much of his time pining for the wife of a wealthy landowner who spends much of his time out of town. She tells Zama that men often lust for her body, but she only desires friendship. Thinking he will best her by feigning friendship to gain frequent audience with her, which he does, Zama soon discovers that he has fallen into her plans, becoming just a confidant while he watches other men go to and from her bedroom at night. She pays him in kisses, which he thinks will lead to more and does not. He is a pillar of misogyny, lusting for her when she is kind to him, dismissing her as having ‘’ when she leaves him cold. By playing into his lusts, she gains the upper hand over him and uses it to guide his rulings in local politics. In the same section, Zama also lusts for a young girl in servitude to his home. After she is beaten and raped by her former lover, Zama vows to take revenge to prove his masculine dominance, which she gladly accepts because it is better for him to risk his life than for her own father. His masculinity stifled, Zama is enraged. In the second section, another woman offers to aid him in his promotion.Having to accept the help of a woman he feels sexually diminished and later rapes her before begging her for money (Zama often lashes out at women by taking them by force, which is extremely problematic but builds to the effect of examining a fragile male ego. Much like modern day with groups such as Meninist wearing their despicable t-shirts to be intentionally offensive in place of actually having to face the reality of gender politics, Zama is most brash and distasteful when he feels socially, emotionally, or intellectually threatened). What seems to aggravate Zama’s fragile ego most is the ease of ability for these women to act--such as Piñares flicking away a poisonous spider and crushing it in bed not long after Zama’s own inability to do so--while his entire efforts fail to form any action.Even when Zama does act he feels his masculinity called into question. His singular act of bravado is to kill a wild dog in defence of a slave girl. He dubs himself “the dogslayer” in self debasing humour, recognizing his own shortcomings. We see Zama constantly reassessing himself, as if his act of storytelling to the reader is an effort to read himself through creating himself. The story takes a dramatic turn in the final segment when Zama is no longer reading himself but the world around him in order to find his place within it.The third section of the novel is an outright masterpiece. An aged Zama worn down from his stagnation attempts one more scheme to curry favour with the Spanish royalty by offering to lead a manhunt for a wanted man terrorizing the countryside, Vicuña Porto, whom had served Zama a decade ago. Here, out in the wild of the American pampas, everything comes to a head. Porto is revealed to be hiding out in the very group of soldiers looking for him and Zama is caught between duty and safety should he reveal Porto. ’’ Zama muses, ‘out thereeach one.’ The plains, once scorned and dismissed by him, are now a lush landscape of danger and mystery. We see the new world as one with it’s own stories, legends and people. We meet a wandering tribe, all blinded when a rival tribe put out their eyes years ago. They learn community as a method of survival and seem free and happy. Now their children, who have eyes, have begun to lead them and are leading them on gold hunting expeditions. Benedetto builds a vast and mystical world that begins to engulf Zama when he is stripped of his society, forcing him to recognize that the powersource of his status and masculinity was a societal battery, the very society he raged against for holding him back. Here, in the wild amongst death and thieves, Zama is weak and mostly just a casual observer. He is beaten several times and retains none of the sense of fearful respect from others we see in the previous sections.Here Zama comes as close to an empathetic character as such a despicable person can be. He is to be pitted, weak and stripped of his stature as he begins to embrace existence and see it for its own reality and not the fantasy of desire. He also begins to bitterly embrace his existential condition, knowing the costs. In an act that is sure to bring doom upon him, he denies the existence of gold in the mountains to spare them.Without spoiling the violent and shocking conclusion, let me simply say that the final dozen pages are some of the finest I have encountered and a satisfying fate for a man whose entire existence is centered on efforts of mobility.Though not for the easily off-put, Antonio Benedetto’s slim masterpieceis a hauntingly satisfying read that will surely stick with you long after the final page has been turned. Rife with the existential horrors of Dostoevsky and the notable influence of Kafka, this literary descent into nightmarish futility is an overlooked classic that deserves the wider readership Esther Allen’s translation will hopefully forge for it. Zama is actually the first novel of a thematically linked trilogy, and the translation of the second book is currently in the works. Male fragility at it’s most despicable and society at its most constrictive, I have nothing but the highest admiration for the work which penetrates like the fear of death on a long lonely night.¹While imprisoned, Di Benedetto was allowed to correspond but not write fiction. In his letters to the outside world he would frequently describe a ‘dream’ he had and then proceed to write a short story in letters so small it required a magnifying glass to read. He was eventually released from prison at the urging of authors such as Heinrich Böll and Jorge Luis Borges ²Another notable Benedetto/Bolaño connection is that of the young blonde boy who plagues Zama throughout each of the three sections of the novel and never seems to age. It is undoubtedly the inspiration for the ‘wizened youth’ who plagues the narrator of Bolaño’s By Night in Chile