Two New Spanish-Language Books Recast Suicide as a Literary and Political Question

It is difficult to speak about suicide, and perhaps just as difficult to read about it without being pulled into questions that are personal, ethical, and political all at once. Two recently translated Spanish-language books now available in English—Antonio di Benedetto’s 1969 novel *The Suicides* and Karen Villeda’s bilingual poetry collection *String Theory / Teoría de Cuerdas*—take up that challenge in sharply different forms. Yet both works begin from the same unsettling premise: thinking about suicide inevitably leads back to the self, and to the choice to remain alive.

The books arrive in English through different publishers and different translation projects. *The Suicides*, the third novel in di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, has been translated by Esther Allen and published by NYRB Classics. Villeda’s *String Theory / Teoría de Cuerdas* appears as a bilingual edition from Cardboard House Press, translated by the trio working under the name NAFTA, or the North American Free Translation Agreement. Despite their differences in era, voice, and genre, both books use suicide as a lens for examining how memory, family history, and violence shape a person’s sense of self.

Di Benedetto’s novel is set in motion by a journalist who becomes fascinated by suicide just as he approaches 33, the age at which his father died by suicide. He decides to pursue local cases of self-harm, but the work is frustrated by delay, vanity, and drift: he keeps promising action for tomorrow or the day after, never quite delivering the report he imagines. Women around him—an archivist, a photographer, and a lab technician—supply the facts, files, and interpretations that he then absorbs. Even so, he remains inert, more interested in theorizing than in doing, and the novel turns that passivity into a critique.

What makes *The Suicides* resonant is not a solemn meditation on death but a satirical attack on a man’s obsession with it. Di Benedetto uses the narrator’s self-importance, ignorance, and misogyny to expose a broader pattern of masculinity built on grievance and inaction. The novel repeatedly suggests that some men experience their own uselessness as oppression, and then respond by seeking drama, power, or crisis. In one striking formulation from the source material, the narrator concludes that if he cannot eliminate the world’s “cruel swine,” then by killing himself they will no longer exist for him. In this way, suicide appears not as a noble philosophical gesture, but as a grimly limited form of agency in a world shaped by authoritarian force.

That reading gains additional weight from the book’s historical context. Di Benedetto wrote in the late 1960s, during an Argentine dictatorship that preceded the Dirty War and sought to suppress democratic life and leftist thought. The novel does not spell out that political backdrop, but the narrator’s refusal to confront his father’s death mirrors his refusal to register the violence around him. Di Benedetto himself would later be jailed and tortured for more than a year during the Dirty War in 1976, a detail that underscores how the novel’s preoccupation with helplessness can be read beside the realities of repression. The text’s version of despair is thus not only private but also historical.

Villeda’s *String Theory / Teoría de Cuerdas* takes a very different formal path. Her autobiographical poetry is shaped by the death of an aunt, also named Karen, who died by suicide two months after the poet was born. The collection returns again and again to that shared name and to the way a family can be bound to an absence that is never fully gone. The title’s reference to string theory in physics becomes, in Villeda’s hands, a metaphor for connection: a theory that links people, bodies, language, and the rope used in Karen’s death. The bilingual edition matters here, because the Spanish word for rope, *cuerda*, is feminine, allowing the poems to blur the line between object and person in a way English cannot fully reproduce.

That instability gives the collection much of its force. Villeda moves through fragments, dialogue, and abstract prose-poetic sequences to show how suicide survives in memory as a contradiction: personal and collective, intimate and public, named and unspeakable. The poems register not only mourning but uncertainty, including the troubling possibility that Karen may not have died by suicide at all, but by femicide. That ambiguity places the book in conversation with contemporary Mexican writing about violence against women, including Cristina Rivera Garza’s *Liliana’s Invincible Summer* (2023). It also aligns with the 8-M feminist framework that treats mourning as a refusal to look away from impunity.

Taken together, the two books reveal how contemporary readers are being invited to think about suicide less as a closed event than as a question that continues to reverberate through literature, translation, and public life. Di Benedetto and Villeda approach the subject from opposite directions—one through sardonic fiction about male failure, the other through an autobiographical poetics of grief and ambiguity—but both insist that suicide’s afterlife includes the living. In that sense, these translations do more than revive significant Latin American texts for English-language readers: they show why the literature of suicide remains inseparable from the literature of survival.