A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicideswhich then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itselfin this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedettos Trilogy of Expectation.A reporters boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, For the blood, so the red is visible. All hes given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead.As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.A photographer assigned to work with himalso a womansnaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widows tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedettos Trilogy of Expectation, called one of the culminating moments of twentiethcentury narrative fiction in Spanish by Juan Jos Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogys final work takes place in a provincial city at the end of the 1960s, which is also when it was written and published, as Argentina plummeted towards the Dirty War. Its protagonist, once again, is a man in his early thirties, stymied and in search of an elsewhere.
