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The Suicides
by
Antonio Di Benedetto
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | The Suicides |
| Author: | Antonio Di Benedetto |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1969 (Eng. 2025) |
| Length: | 165 pages |
| Original in: | Spanish |
| Availability: | The Suicides - US |
| Los suicidas - US | |
| The Suicides - UK | |
| The Suicides - Canada | |
| Les suicidés - France | |
| Los suicidas - España | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- Spanish title: Los suicidas
- Translated and with an Afterword by Esther Allen
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Our Assessment:
A- : challenging subject matter well-handled, and neatly done
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harper's | . | 1/2025 | Dan Piepenbring |
| The Spectator | . | 7/12/2024 | Stuart Kelly |
From the Reviews:
- "The Suicides trades [Zama's] comical grandiosity for noirish brevity, with mixed results. (...) But a good chunk of the novel amounts to fun facts about suicide. (...) Whatever shock these statements once had has dissipated; it's no longer bizarre to grasp suicide as a litany of statistics." - Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
- "The novel is written in a laconic, lapidary style, very different to the standard image of recent Latin American literature (.....) Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated." - Stuart Kelly, The Spectator
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
The epigraph to The Suicides is taken from Albert Camus -- in the Spanish original of the novel only in Spanish translation:
Todos los hombres sanos han pensado en su suicidio alguna vez.This English edition offers also the (slightly more open-ended) French original -- with ellipsis, as there's more to sentence --: "Tous les homes sains ayant songé a [sic] leur propre suicide", as well as an English translation: "Every sane man has thought about committing suicide at some point".
The narrator of the novel certainly has the subject on his mind -- for good reason, too, as the novel's opening sentences very clearly suggest:
My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.He also recalls his paternal grandfather, boasting of the family tradition: "Twelve -- twelve suicides there have been among us". And, yes, the narrative does continue through that last Friday of the next month .....
He was thirty-three.
I'll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.
The narrator is also otherwise preöccupied with suicide, as he is assigned by the boss at the news agency he works for to write an investigative series on some suicides -- inspired by photographs of two recent deaths, the dead with their eyes open: "staring ... as if they were staring into themselves. But in horror".
It amounts to a rather daunting task:
The mystery of those who kill themselves ! He might as well be asking me to resolve the mystery of death itself in ten six-hundred-word installments, each illustrated with five color photsHe is assigned -- ordered; she isn't someone he would have chosen -- to work with Marcela. Others helping him and providing him with death- and suicide-related information and background include Julia, a teacher who gets in trouble for asking her young pupils to write about death, as well as researcher Bibi the Card Catalogue.
The narrator immerses himself in the subject-matter -- but he is also in many ways disengaged, including in his personal relationships, and can and does repeatedly step back and away. Typically:
That's enough for now. I duck into a movie theater where Alphaville is playing. I'll work tomorrow.If not entirely consumed by the subject matter, it does lap at him from all sides; so also The Suicides comes with all sorts of suicide-trivia -- which largely remains trivia, not really providing insight into the underlying questions. But he also does pose the significant ones -- above all, the fundamental philosophical one:
The question isn't why would I kill myself. It's why I wouldn't kill myself.Still, in his meandering -- physical as well as speculative -- he does see: "Life is tenacious".
The narrator's sense of detachment, mirrored also in the presentation of his narrative, with its often short series of paragraphs and its dialogues, contrasts effectively with the material, with all its underlying emotion (and pathos). He is more observer than man of action, digesting his experiences and encounters to put them in writing -- in the agency-story he is supposed to file, or this more expansive account. He engages deeply with this subject matter -- death and suicide -- and, at some level, very personally, but maintains also a critical objectivity. The novel's conclusion is dark -- death is inescapable -- but nicely turned, down to the concluding staccato of sentences:
I have to put some clothes on because I'm naked.Many aspects of The Suicides are dark, but it is not simply bleak. There's a nice light comic edge to it, and the narrative is well-balanced between the personal and the clinical-analytic. It's difficult subject-matter to build a character portrait around, but Di Benedetto's approach -- of having his narrator be a reporter, as it were -- works well, and the portrait winds up being (almost surprisingly) well-rounded.
Utterly naked.
That's how we're born.
- M.A.Orthofer, 19 December 2024
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The Suicides:
- New York Review Books publicity page
- Adriana Hidalgo editora publicity page
- éditions corti publicity page
- Schavelzon Graham information page
- La periódica revisión dominical (Spanish)
- Publishers Weekly
- Retrato Literario (Spanish)
- Sudcalifornios (Spanish)
- Un libro al día (Spanish)
- Hermann Burger's Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis
- See Index of Latin and South American literature
- Other books from New York Review Books
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Argentine author Antonio Di Benedetto lived 1922 to 1986.
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© 2024 the complete review
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