Zama

By: Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen - preface translation

Narrated by: Armando Durán

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the 18th 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. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and 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 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, with its stark, dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and 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.

©2016 Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Super read

This narrator is tops his Spanish superb Any book he reads is an
Exciting experience.

Lost Master Work of The New World

Lost masterpiece of the new world. I Followed Bolano's advice. Can't go wrong with that.

Fantastic

Anyone who's watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will recognize Don Diego as Dennis Reynolds, and have a rollicking good time listening to his misadventures. Anyone who ponders existential quandaries will find good company in Don Diego's ruminations, and will finish the book feeling sated, yet hungry for discussion and reflection.

A Good Book, But Even Intentional Repetition Gets

Reading “Zamia” reminded me of when some years ago, I read a collection of the complete short stories of Franz Kafka. Not just because of the Kafkaesque sensibility of di Benedetto’s writing, but because I once again started with the thought of how insightful the main idea was, but eventually began to think “Okay, I get it already.” The idea of existential futility is enhanced to a degree by repetition, but at some point iteration and reiteration and reiteration lose power and come to seem like either a trick or a monomania. This is a short novel, and not a bad one, but it is still a bit too long to carry on a single idea.

The narration, by Armando Durán, is very good. He conveys the feeling of a story being re-told, and he is easy to follow and pleasant to listen to.

Poetic justice

Zama is most interesting as a psychological portrait. Individual who is acutely aware of his position in society, his relationship to men and women his effort to survive in battle and politically and his search for return to domestic bliss. In the meantime, he is enduring the pesos of life inArgentina. It is a historical novel and also an existential novel that is about someone who is waiting and waiting, and who finally learns as in a bildungsroman at the end that he has learned nothing.