Novel
Zama
Antonio Di Benedetto · 1956
Synopsis
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Don Diego de Zama, a servant of the Spanish Crown, is posted to Asunción, capital of remote Paraguay, according to New York Review Books. Separated from his wife and children, consumed by pride, desire and grudges, he shirks work and schemes to obtain a promotion and a transfer to Buenos Aires. The narrative is divided into three parts dated 1790, 1794 and 1799.
Context
Published in 1956 by Doble P, the novel appeared in French from Denoël in 1976, in the translation by Laure Guille-Bataillon, taken up by José Corti in 2011, according to the BnF. Esther Allen's English translation, in 2016, received the National Translation Award, and Benjamin Kunkel saw in it, in The New Yorker, a neglected masterpiece. Lucrecia Martel adapted it for the cinema in 2017. Roberto Bolaño drew a short story from the author and the book.
Who it is for
A novel in Spanish of about two hundred pages, on the waiting and the pride of a civil servant.
Prizes and reception
Long neglected outside Argentina, then acclaimed in English; translation awarded a prize in 2017, film in 2017.
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