Zama

First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. 

Written in a style that is both precise & sumptuous, weirdly archaic & powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century & 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. 

There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, & paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed & 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, & very American, loneliness. 

Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose & spare imagery, is at once dense & unforeseen, terse & fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, & sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

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Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentine journalist & author of five novels, of which Zama is the most well known. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal (1952), appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World.

Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto's Zama. Co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she teaches at City University of New York's Graduate Center & Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program.