Antonio Di Benedetto and the Latin American condition

IT IS 1790 in Asunción. Today the capital of Paraguay, it was once an early colonial hub but by the end of the 18th century had become a backwater, the end of the line in a Spanish empire fast approaching the end of its time. Diego de Zama, the legal adviser to the governor, is a man with a brilliant past but, he confesses, now “subjugated by circumstances and without opportunities”. While he waits and waits for a half-promised posting, he is tortured by his desire for illicit love despite his inner promise of fidelity to his wife and children, distant by “half the length of two countries and the width of the second”.

So begins “Zama”, a short novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, published in 1956. Di Benedetto was born and lived for much of his life in Mendoza, an Argentine city in wine country at the foot of the Andes. He shunned the cosmopolitan cultural world of Buenos Aires. He preferred a life on the periphery. Though his work was appreciated in literary circles in Argentina and was translated into several European languages, only in 2016 was “Zama”, his masterwork, published in English (in a fluent translation by Esther Allen). Di Benedetto’s name is unmentioned in many histories of Latin American literature. In future ones it is likely to figure large.

In “Zama” he created a haunting novel about solitude and self-...