Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that  very reason I'm at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in my moments of lassitude when I'm barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction for repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

Diego de Zama is a moderately powerful colonial figure in 18th century Paraguay. Unlike many of his fellow administrators, he is an Americano, born in South America, not Spain. His wife and son are back at home in (I think) Lima, while he toils in a relative backwater. He is professionally and romantically frustrated, obsessed with women of "pure" European blood, unlike his own. His amorousness leads him into several complicated relationships: with Luciana, the wife of another administrator, with Emilia, a peasant woman who bears Zama's child, and others. At one point, unable to pay for his room in the hotel (his salary from Madrid being humiliatingly delayed), he moves into the house of an old man where either one or two women are living. He grows obsessed with her--or them? The intractability of this mystery, punctuated by sudden glimpses of a woman at a window or at the end of a hall, is indicative of the strangeness and indeterminacy of Zama.

I read Zama at the beach. This was, I think, not quite the ideal choice, though some of the salt marshes recall the stinking swamps of Zama's Paraguay, which is, at the novel's opening, captured by the corpse of a monkey moving in and out with the tide. But I wasn't prepared for just how weird Zama is. I hate the word "difficult" when applied to books, because books can be difficult in different ways, but Zama is a book whose fundamental reality is subject to obfuscation and slippage. It's strange that Zama himself is an Americano, because he seems to have absorbed already a colonial's perspective on South America as a strange and exotic place where strange and mysterious things might happen.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Zama's life is a series of frustrations. He's entirely unable to get his request for a transfer sent to Madrid, and is thus indefinitely separated from his family and forestalled from professional prestige or advancement. His fellow administrators treat him with dismissal or even unexplained hostility, even going so far as to sic beggar thieves upon him. The final of Zama's three sections ends with him enlisted in a platoon tasked with hunting down an infamous murderer and thief. But Zama is the only one who knows that the murderer is actually one of the party, and the dilemma this puts him in--whom to ally with, whom to betray--is typical of a book in which the colonial apparatus appears more as a knot of shifting allegiances and alliances. There is no way for Zama, no path forward for advancement or even stability, and there is no choice that can prevent him from suffering the final destiny that meets him at the novel's end.