Reviews

The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto

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brunogcarr's review against another edition

4.0

Com uma escrita despida de tudo o que são excessos e ruídos desnecessários, Antonio Di Benedetto narra a história de um homem que busca o silêncio que lhe permita escrever o livro que deseja. Durante essa tarefa de eliminar o barulho circundante, vai descobrindo "ruídos" que habitam em si.
Este O silencieiro veio pedir para não adiar as leituras de Zama e de Os suicidas.

weejman33's review

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3.0

Add this to the “literally me” contingency of stories that are either generation defining or complete shit. Somehow “The Silentiary” falls in the middle.

dariuskay's review

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5.0

A singular book. The style & narrative voice of the Corregidor are pulled directly from his masterpiece Zama, and works wonders here as well.

vojvel's review against another edition

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5.0

Nezklamalo. Občas se mi stává, že styl vyprávění autora mi je blízký - tak moc se do něj vložím, že jej na konci vůbec nedokáži popsat. Překlad Benedetteho Tišitele je toho zdárným příkladem.
Ale přece jen - Tišitel je podmanivý pro myšlenku hlavního hrdiny, stejně tak pro velmi konstantní úroveň vypravěčství (žádné velké vzrušení, ale ani žádná hluchá místa zaplněná nepotřebnými větami).

Bezejmenná hlavní postava líčí své trápení až s obsesivním odporem k hluku vydávaného lidmi, ať už jimi samými, nebo stroji, které používají.
V jádru příběhu nejde ani tak o protiklad hluku, který hlavní postava nedokáže snést, a ticha, které vlastně ani tak vyžadováno není, ale spíše o vylíčení mnohosti "znění", které mezi těmito protiklady stojí. Toto "znění" má mnoho podob, škál i pólů, přičemž některé z nich jsou snesitelnými, některé vyžadují odpor. Te se projevuje jako marný boj jedince se společností, stejně jaké boj v sobě samém. Boj časem vedený spíše ze zvyku, bez vzpomínky na příčinu, ale vedený s fatálním odhodláním.

emsemsems's review

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5.0

‘And if he does harm without knowing it…? If he believes he’s playing music, but what you hear is noise?’

The writing is more allegorical, more nuanced, more poetic than it lets on (on the surface). The simplicity of the text is deliciously ‘deceptive’ to any reader who doesn’t read between the lines or who doesn’t give any fucks about anything below the surface level. But I am obsessed. Huge thanks to the translator for making the text so accessible/available. Fully enjoyed the translator’s notes at the end of the book as well.

‘Di Benedetto’s aesthetic sobriety—far too enmeshed in the insidious morass of the real to be distracted by these rhetorical artifices, which did not suit his temperament—was ignored for decades by successive and interchangeable fabricators of reputations because it pursued a unique personal path of probity and lucidity. Though from the start a tiny group of readers, gradually increasing in number over the years, was able to recognize the obvious genius of his fiction, and though a few translations and reissued editions have come out in recent decades, the immense debt that Argentine culture owes to Antonio Di Benedetto has yet to be settled.

The prizes he won, which he proudly listed on the flaps of his books, were ridiculously disproportionate to the texts they were meant to reward. We might almost say, when we consider the profound meaning of those texts, that those prizes merely attest to an anachronism. Well intentioned though they were, such local acknowledgements—municipal, provincial, or national; governmental or corporate—cast an equivocal light upon a body of work that is at once cerebral and gut-wrenching. In the subjects it addresses and the wise artistry of its composition, Di Benedetto’s writing is of universal significance.’ — Juan José Saer (from ‘Introduction’)

Started reading the book being (vaguely) ignorant to the historical context (and knowing nothing about the book/author), I found the narrator’s reaction to the ‘noise’ sort of relatable (especially on a surface level/most direct sense) as someone who sleeps with ‘earplugs’ on. At first, I had found it rather unsettling and insecure ‘blocking off’ such an essential, sensorial part of me in one’s apparently most vulnerable state. But it was a matter of ‘sleep’ or the lack of it, and the former ‘made more sense’, ultimately.

‘I’m staggered to realise, at last, that the machine in question is a lathe. It’s true that I had never seen a lathe, and that must be true of many people. But in any city, terms like machinist and metalworks abound, along with other indicators that, at an earlier time in my life, would have produced an immediate response in my mind.

At an earlier time in my life.’

I was reading [b:Homage to Catalonia|876061|Homage to Catalonia|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492243133l/876061._SY75_.jpg|2566499] alongside this particular AdB book/novel. I am not making any comparisons here (as it would not be fair; and it would not give space to any interesting discussions). But simply, I am only saying that because of how I have experienced Abd’s writing (for the first time at that), I am transported towards a closer intimacy to the phrase (by Albert Camus, in [b:The Fall|219972|The Fall|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439035433l/219972._SY75_.jpg|3324245]) :

‘Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? —Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.’

That being said, I would still — 10 out of 10 times choose the company of friends who seem to me to be more ‘honest’ than others, even if brutally so. This revelation, with regards to the ideas and work of AdB’s and Camus’ above — is not a concept/idea that extends/is applicable to ‘personal relationships’.

‘Some nights she’d try to scribble her police bulletins into my ears, telling me, for example, “They brought in the girl, the one who killed her fiancé. She’ll kill herself, too. She was screaming for them to give her a gun.”

A single gesture dammed the flow. “Don’t give me thoughts. Thoughts will keep me from sleeping.”’

In the earlier part of the novel, that that brought the characters together, enabling them to forge intimacies is — I would argue how keenly perceptive they are of one another; and how their philosophies intertwine with one another. They seem to be more sensitive to the world (in general) and refuse to be consumed by the ‘noise’, ever ‘resisting’

Spoiler

(one more than the other, arguably, but still)

. To resist being desensitised.

‘Special vigilance was always required to protect it from mistreatment by children, and on one occasion it generated an incomprehensible dispute. But the piano wasn’t a matter of blind obstinacy on my mother’s part. She needed it with her as a monument to the family’s memories. For memories, as everyone knows, cannot be erased.

The dispute—happened because the landlady’s daughter was practising her Chopin, without success, above my room. I didn’t ask for much, only for something like mercy, but the landlady called me cruel and absurd, wept, and pointed at my piano, claiming that not only had I sacrificed that one but I wanted to sacrifice all other pianos too.’

A majority of the dark humour (or what I view/read as ‘dark humour’) in the book — carried out by the narrator — either directly or indirectly; intentionally or otherwise — is an absurdly ‘shocking’ delivery of ‘truth’ in what is essentially ‘happening’ in a work of ‘fiction’. It progressively surpassed itself in terms of limiting the ‘humour’ in just monologues/dialogues about halfway through the novel when the protagonist moves his ‘bed’ into the living room — which at first glance/read is absolutely bizarre. I’m rendered so weak with awe and admiration at how AdB’s able to so successfully write such brilliant lines of ‘humour’ (and even more so?) when I think of the ‘state’ he was in when he was writing this.

‘The furniture mimics the prelude to a summer storm; the dragging of the dresser and hutch are rumbling thunder, and the bookshelf, recently emptied of its cargo, falls over with a loud bang and skids along the floor.’

‘Noise’ is stretched and developed into more complex discussions in the book, in the cleverest ways. AdB’s writing injects me with a strong stream of innocuous envy, in the most satisfying ways that require no resolutions whatsoever. A figurative nod of recognition as a response, at most. But ultimately also triggers in me an unlimited amount of admiration for AdB as well.

‘It isn’t always music of the type I would have chosen. Sometimes we hear it when I feel like listening to music, but we also hear it when I don’t feel like listening to music.

Therefore, yes, it’s music, but it isn’t chosen music. It’s imposed music.
Music, which is sound, becomes noise when it is imposed. Imposed music.

In the same way, words from the radio or television represent nothing but noise when, as is usually the case, they have no meaning, or very little, or even if they do have meaning, it escapes me, because I’m listening to the words against my will.

Without my interest or acceptance, the TV becomes just noise with faces.’

This might be one of my favourite books of all-time. The translator, Esther Allen’s notes (that I had found to be especially interesting) below to conclude:

‘Saer’s bold assertion that these books constitute a trilogy has thrived because reading them as a trilogy enriches each one, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. While their narratives are widely separated in time, a forward temporal current runs through them, making the overall tripartite structure echo that of Zama, which is divided into three sections titled 1790, 1794, and 1799.’

‘The most powerful force acting upon these three novels to make them converge into a whole is not autobiography but history, the uncanny way the three books reverberate through the future course of their author’s life and Argentine history. Which, in retrospect, they seem to expect. The ineluctable movement into the present they trace can also be read as a movement toward totalitarianism, which, with the support and consent of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, came to full power in Argentina following a military coup d’état on March 24, 1976. That same day, officers came to arrest Di Benedetto as he sat working at his desk at the Mendoza newspaper Los Andes; for the next sixteen months he was imprisoned and tortured. Di Benedetto was fortunate. He was released and went into exile. Thirty thousand others disappeared during the Dirty War. (One of the methods used—drugging prisoners and dropping them into the ocean from airplanes or helicopters—.’

‘In its current form, even the novel’s last sentence includes an ellipsis. The final line of the first edition of El silenciero, however, was simply “La noche sigue.” (“The night flows on.”) Period. —In 1975, Di Benedetto added five new sentences to the final passage, where the protagonist, now in prison, has a dream. He did not know that he would soon be in prison himself, and that he would smuggle out the short stories he managed to write there—later published under the title Absurdos—by including them in his letters as descriptions of dreams. He did not know how soon history would rush into his novel’s silent ellipses, filling them with new meanings of its own and transforming its inconclusive ending into one of chilling prescience.’

teodomo's review against another edition

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4.0

Novela angustiosa, rutinaria y un tanto críptica (algo kafkiana, ahora que lo pienso). Habiendo leído las tres obras de la denominada "trilogía de la espera" (Zama, El silenciero, Los suicidas) de Di Benedetto, veo varios paralelismos entre las tres. Un par de ellos: la personalidad de los protagonistas (solitarios, parcos, monomaníacos, con ciertas dificultades para socializar) y el elemento recurrente que los persigue (desarraigo, ruido, suicidio). La prosa única de Di Benedetto también las hermana irremediablemente. Hacia el final se desdibuja pero me gustaron mucho las últimas líneas ("Siento el cerebro...") así como las facetas que tiene y el destino que se le da al personaje de Besarión.

Intertextualidad

Menciones directas:
* "Sobre el ruido y el sonido" en Parerga y paralipómena (1851) de Arthur Schopenhauer (cita).
* Ópera Lohengrin (1850) de Richard Wagner.
* Ópera Orfeo en los infiernos (1858) de Jacques Offenbach, Hector Crémieux y Ludovic Halévy.
* El rey Lear (1606) de William Shakespeare.
* Ópera Guillermo Tell (1829) de Gioachino Rossini, Étienne de Jouy e Hippolyte Bis.
* Mención al episodio de Odiseo/Ulises y las sirenas, de la Odisea (ca. s. VIII a. C.) de Homero.
* Mención a los autores:
-Søren Kierkegaard (Dinamarca, s. XIX)
-Maurice de Sully (Francia, s. XII) (alusión)
-Immanuel Kant (Alemania, s. XVIII-XIX)
-Johann Wolgang von Goethe (Alemania, s. XVIII-XIX)
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Alemania, s. XVIII)
-Jean Paul (Alemania, s. XIX-XX)
-Eugène Ionesco (Rumania/Francia, s. XX)

Indirecta:
?

* Lugares (excepto el primero, todos mencionados por Besarión en poca profundidad):
-Lugar indeterminado de Latinoamérica (alguna ciudad).
-París, Francia.
-Reims, Gran Este, Francia.
-Zúrich, Suiza (Sihlstrasse, Stadtheater, Schauspielhaus, colegiata de Arlesheim, ayuntamiento de Zúrich)
-Lucerna, Suiza.
-Einsiedeln, Suiza.
-Andalucía, España.
-Venecia, Véneto, Italia (Basílica de San Marcos).
-Ciudad del Vaticano (Basílica de San Pedro).
-Roma, Lacio, Italia.
* Ambientes: Café, circo, departamento, laboral, oficina, prisión, taller, urbano.
* Animales: Gato, mosca, abeja.
* Bailes: Ballet.
* Figuras recurrentes: Escritor/a frustrado/a, rentista ruin, mecánico/a, persona que abandona los estudios, pianista aficionado/a, periodista, folclorista, dueño/a de circo, domador/a, comisario/a, policía, fantaseador/a, político/a, camionero/a, enfermero/a, ladrón/a, presidiario/a, posible loco/a.
* Deidades (mencionadas): Dioniso/Baco, Hades/Plutón, Perséfone/Proserpina.
* Sustancias: Alcohol, sedantes.
* Enfermedades: Hiperacusia (?), dispepsia, neuralgia.