Death and his suit, published in 1961, is a book out of time. Its author, Santiago Dabove, died in 1952; the stories, poems and reflections were written between 1930 and 1940; his style oscillated between avant-garde fantasy and nineteenth-century decadence. In that first edition, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: "For this dream or reality that bears the number of 1960, Santiago has died and lives in the realities or dreams that this book proposes."
In this book, death is an obsession. His footsteps lurk in each of the texts with a light humorous tone that marks the path. In the famous story "Being Dust", a man describes his own decomposition and slowly lets his humanity slip away from him; in "Finis", the end of the world falls on a character who will look for an escape route in carnal love; in "Death and the Masks," a gloomy carnival leads to murder. Also, strikes in cemeteries, sick bodies, reflections on destruction and the end and other funereal delights sprout in these pages like mold on tombstones.
Reader of Poe and Maupassant, friend of Macedonio Fernández and Borges, Santiago Dabove had the idea of ​​playing with death. This strange book, Death and I brought it from him, is the result of these dark events, of a renewed mythology of the fleeting.