Review: Zama (Author: Antonio Di Benedetto, translated by Esther Allen).
As a researcher interested in the science of waiting times, I read Zama with great interest to understand how literature treats waiting.
Zama is a tale of one man’s slow descent into perdition, a catalog of unfulfilled dreams and airy castles in future, and a compelling narrative of a mind idling in vacuous machinations.
Don Diego de Zama is posted in a remote outpost of Asuncion, Paraguay in the late 18th century, separated from his wife and family and the civilized society of Buenos Aires where he aspires to be instead. Zama believes the posting to be a temporary blip in his exalted bureaucratic service — an onerous test of faith before collecting his richly deserved dues for his unflinching loyalty to the Spanish crown.
It becomes apparent to the reader that the posting might be just deserts. Don Diego, we learn, is an amoral, unscrupulous man characterized by a volatile combination of amorous intemperance and high self-regard. It is not unfathomable that he was perhaps relegated to his private hell due to his abrasive personality, poor judgment, and his unkindness to those who depend on him, including his own son.
He constantly lusts for conquests of married women, daydreams about his deserved rewards arriving from the crown, and wallows in self-pity, all while engaging in petty squabbles and treacherous acts of ingratitude.
Don Diego is also an everyman. Like us, he is imprisoned in the air between the sky of aspiration and the earth of subsistence.
The writing weaves between spare descriptions in daily journals and stark ruminations of savage potency. The language is rich and yet sparse — dramatic short bursts interspersed in decades of languid loneliness — Zama clocks in at a concise 198 pages. As the book hurtles to its catharsis of Zama’s interminable wait, a conclusion that is simultaneously bursting with psychedelic imagination and stoic stillness:
“I opened my eyelids as slowly as if I were creating the dawn.” (pp. 197),
I was reminded of the resplendent ending of the SF Classic, Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination”.
A remarkable cover photograph on the NYRB edition is due to Guido Boggiani (his own tale parallels the self-enforced solitude of the author Antonio Di Benedetto). The picture is an amazing vignette of the imposing landscape that slowly envelops Zama’s spiraling loneliness.