Zama

"Antonio di Benedetto is rather less well-known than some of his American contemporaries: Gabriel García Márquez , Mario Vargas Llosa , and his fellow Argentinian, Julio Cortázar. He wasn’t as well known then and he isn’t as well-known now. Lucrecia Martel made a name for herself with a movie called La Ciénaga and another film called The Headless Woman . Zama was met with widespread critical acclaim. Zama is about a character who is in an alien place who wants to get back home. So it has something in common with the other books and films that I’ve been talking about. It’s the story of an official, a former chief administrator, Don Diego de Zama, in an outpost of the Spanish Empire in the late 1700s, who is seeking advancement and reposting that will enable him to reunite with his wife and children. The circumstances in the novel and the film are slightly different, but I don’t think I need to go into that in detail. He’s also a very unattractive character—so we might compare him with Ripley, perhaps, in that sense. He’s desperately flawed, amoral and ever unsuccessful. He’s not competent like Ripley, not so much of a sociopath either, but rather more deluded. J.M. Coetzee called him, “vain, maladroit, narcissistic and morbidly suspicious; he is prone to excesses of lust and fits of violence, and endowed with an endless capacity for self-deception.” In the New Yorker Benjamin Kunkel wrote, “the story’s preoccupation is the tension between human freedom and constraining circumstance.” It’s the way in which novelist and filmmaker approach that wonderful insight which is so interesting to me. In particular, I want to take the example of the beginning of the novel and film as an illustration of how prose storytelling works and how cinematic storytelling works."