THE SILENTIARY

A man confronts the encroachment of urban noise on his home and life in this novel by Argentinian writer Di Benedetto (1922-1986) originally published in 1964.

The unnamed narrator is 25, lives with his mother, and works as an assistant manager at an unspecified business in an unnamed city. A few words into the novel, the problem appears: “I open the gate and meet the noise.” It’s the sound of a bus idling, and it “punctures our life with shocks.” At work, a transistor radio plays on his boss’s desk. Back home, a new shock emerges as an industrial shed is built nearby for an auto-repair shop. He moves to a place where it seems noise is unlikely, to no avail. The nemesis grows to comic proportions: a dance hall with six vocalists and three orchestras. When he isn’t suffering and complaining—“noise stalks and harries me”—the narrator ponders writing a “book about helplessness” called The Roof or perhaps a crime novel. He admires a young woman in the neighborhood but marries another. He has philosophical chats with his friend Besarión, who goes off on a “bewildered pilgrimage” in search of an unspecified sign or signal, which might be a fly that lands on his neck in Rome. This is the second novel of a trilogy, following Zama (1956). His hero’s existential predicament might recall Kafka or Dostoevsky, albeit on a lighter scale. It develops in spare, careful prose and sustains a thread of dry humor in the narrator’s self-importance, especially in the pomposity and awkwardness of his expressions (shades of John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly), suggesting the fledgling writer trying his tiny wings. Allen’s translation renders these nicely, such as “Day has developed in my windowpanes” or “It feels as if someone is vociferating through a megaphone and hurling cascades of screws and bolts at me.”

A strange, amusing novel by a writer well worth investigating.