"Blending the futility of Kafka's surveyors with the inner turmoil of Dostoyevsky's underground men, Di Benedetto's martyrs of deferment await a deliverance that never comes. Their lives--inert, almost parenthetical--offer up the psychological extremity of stasis. Madness, obsession, and terminal lassitude hang in equipoise from his subtle systems of narrative suspension. . . . Di Benedetto's lean, existential fictions have always dramatized the impossibility of living. . . . Di Benedetto's strange, austere book of foiled escapes and delicate cruelties glows with a lunar abstraction." --Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

"Di Benedetto recasts the major conflict of the modern world as a war between noise and silence with this sly treatise on an individual's attempts to remain sane in a city where his consciousness is frequently set off-kilter, 'in defiance of any lunatic who might pretend otherwise.' The result is existential, nervy, and crisply imagined." --Publishers Weekly

"The Silentiary is the second book in what is known as di Benedetto's Trilogy of Expectation, following Zama, a mordant chronicle of inaction set in a tedious 18th-century backwater of colonial South America. The books have a spiritual kinship with Samuel Beckett's postwar trilogy of monologue novels in their deadpan rendering of comic futility and monomania." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"[Antonio di Benedetto's] hero's existential predicament might recall Kafka or Dostoevsky, albeit on a lighter scale. [The Silentiary] develops in spare, careful prose and sustains a thread of dry humor. . . A strange, amusing novel." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Di Benedetto writes in sharp, modern, deceptively simple prose . . . he was a bridge between Jorge Luis Borges, with his mental labyrinths, and Roberto Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean whose work explored both the condition of the writer and chronic violence in Latin America." --Michael Reid, The Economist

"[The Silentiary] calls to mind Kafka's pregnantly indecipherable novels, but Di Benedetto fills out his quasi-allegorical premise with so many dingy particulars that his narrator seems to experience his universal problem, in what may be the universal way, as a private shame and defeat." --Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker