Existential in nature, the plot centers around the eponymous Don Diego de Zama, a minor official of the colonial Spanish Empire stationed in remote Paraguay during the late 18th century and his attempts to receive a long-awaited promotion and transfer to Buenos Aires in the face of personal and professional stagnation.

These existential themes of inward and outward stasis because of circumstance drive the novel's narrative as being constantly in motion yet never changing.

Separated from his wife and children, he continuously schemes for professional advancement as he struggles with his mental and emotional state as isolation, bureaucratic setbacks, and self-destructive choices begin to compound themselves in his life.

Obscure on its original release and unknown to English readers before its translation in 2016, Zama has since been considered by various critics to be a major work of Argentine literature.

[1][2][3] Roberto Bolaño used Antonio di Benedetto and Zama as the basis of his short story "Sensini" from the collection Last Evenings on Earth, about fictional writer Luis Antonio Sensini and his novel Ugarte, likewise about an 18th-century colonial bureaucrat, described as having been written with "neurosurgical precision.