Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto · 1956

First published in 1956, *Zama* is hailed as a masterpiece of modern Argentine and Spanish‑language literature. Set in the last decade of the eighteenth century in Asunción, the remote capital of Paraguay, the novel follows Don Diego de Zama, a criollo officer of the Spanish crown, as he endures a solitary, suspended existence while obsessively awaiting a transfer to Buenos Aires. Through precise, sumptuous prose, Di Benedetto portrays Zama’s pride, lust, petty grudges and paranoid fantasies, charting his psychological decline and existential loneliness amid colonial bureaucracy and frontier isolation.