Zama

Zama - Paperback

$16.95
Sale price  $16.95 Regular price 
Skip to product information
Zama

Zama - Paperback

by Antonio Di Benedetto
$16.95
Sale price  $16.95 Regular price 

Book Overview

An NYRB Classics Original

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 and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth 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.
ISBN9781590177174
Author Antonio Di Benedetto
PublisherNew York Review of Books
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedAugust 2016
LanguageENG- English
Pages224
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

About Antonio Di Benedetto

Antonio di Benedetto (1922-1986) began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo animal. Zama (NYRB Classics) was his first novel; it was followed by The Silentiary (NYRB Classics), The Suicides, and Sombras, nada m?s . . . Over the course of his career he received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments, and he earned the admiration of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort?zar, and Roberto Bola?o.

You may also like