The Silentiary

"Di Benedetto recasts the major conflict of the modern world as a war between noise and silence with this sly treatise on an individual’s attempts to remain sane in a city where his consciousness is frequently set off-kilter, ‘in defiance of any lunatic who might pretend otherwise.‘ The result is existential, nervy, and crisply imagined." — Publishers Weekly " The Silentiary is the second book in what is known as di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, following Zama, a mordant chronicle of inaction set in a tedious 18th-century backwater of colonial South America. The books have a spiritual kinship with Samuel Beckett’s postwar trilogy of monologue novels in their deadpan rendering of comic futility and monomania." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Antonio di Benedetto’s] hero’s existential predicament might recall Kafka or Dostoevsky, albeit on a lighter scale. [ The Silentiary] develops in spare, careful prose and sustains a thread of dry humor. . . A strange, amusing novel.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Di Benedetto writes in sharp, modern, deceptively simple prose . . . he was a bridge between Jorge Luis Borges, with his mental labyrinths, and Roberto Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean whose work explored both the condition of the writer and chronic violence in Latin America.” —Michael Reid, The Economist “[ The Silentiary] calls to mind Kafka’s pregnantly indecipherable novels, but Di Benedetto fills out his quasi-allegorical premise with so many dingy particulars that his narrator seems to experience his universal problem, in what may be the universal way, as a private shame and defeat.” —Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker