Zama
About this audiobook
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.
First published in 1956, 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.
About the author
Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentina-born author who received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments.
Esther Allen is an essayist and translator from Spanish and French. Among her translations are Horacio Verbitsky’s The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, José Marti: Selected Writings, and José Manuel Prieto’s Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two translation fellowships, one of them for Zama, and the French government has named her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Baruch College.
Armando Duran has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the repertory acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
