Literature in the Time of Suicide

Carolyn Fornoff reads two recently translated Latin American books together to examine how literature approaches suicide, grief, and violence. Antonio Di Benedetto’s The Suicides, first published in 1969 and now translated by Esther Allen, follows a journalist approaching the age of 33, the same age at which his father died by suicide. Rather than confronting that history directly, he turns an investigation of local suicides into another form of obsession and delay. Fornoff sees the novel less as a serious study of suicide than as a sardonic critique of masculinity, passivity, and society’s fascination with death. Karen Villeda’s autobiographical poetry collection String Theory takes a very different approach. It revolves around the death of the poet’s aunt Karen, whose name Villeda inherited, and uses language, memory, and uncertainty to explore whether the aunt died by suicide or was murdered. The book shows how one death can bind generations together and become inseparable from the survivor’s sense of self. Fornoff argues that both works ultimately use suicide to ask how people continue living amid violence, loss, and the persistent difficulty of finding language for what cannot be fully understood.

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