Light at the End of The Tunnel
Over a week-end full of exciting global events, such as the magnificent royal wedding between British Prince William and Katherine of Middletown, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, followed by the beatification of Pope John Paul II, and the killing of mastermind terrorist Usama bin Laden, the Latin American literature lost one of his greatest contemporary writers, Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sábato, the author of El Túnel, a novel considered by international critics as one of the greatest masterpiece of contemporary Latin American literature, and as a unique book of universal creative value in gender, content, and style.
The story of painter Juan Pablo Castel and María Iribarne starts with the connection they made through a small window in one of the painters’ paints, which remains unperceivable to others during an artwork exhibition, except for her. Juan Pablo Castel, the starring and narrator of The Tunnel suggests softly that there is a interior tunnel in his life, a psychological and somber one where internal passions confront what he sees as life hypocrisy on human relations based only on personal interests as he seeks himself. Indeed, this entire perception goes far beyond Balzac’s social event in life or Dostoievski’s romanticist psychological analysis of Raskolnikov personality and feelings or Agatha Christie’s thrilling dramas.
In real life, Sábato is greatly afflicted by the turbulence derived from the atomic bombs blast in Japan and his scientific research as a physicist, which he abandons after attaining a PhD in Physics in Argentina and post-doctoral research work in France.
The Tunnel is one of the preferred readings for young Latin American literature students, and in fact a book that is attractive to the entire Spanish-American nation, and a masterpiece of grace and universal magnitude. This was a novel that I read several times and on which I had a comprehensive literary analysis.
Sábato was greatly involved with human rights in particular in Argentina, his country of birth. Sábato’s gender had influenced several contemporary young generations of writers all around the world, but most significantly in South America.
Sábato’s works involve:
Novels
▪ 1948: El túnel (Translated by Harriet de Onis in 1950 as The Outsider and again by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1988 as The Tunnel.)
Essays
▪ 1956: El caso Sabato. Torturas y libertad de prensa. Carta abierta al General Aramburu (The Sabato Case. Tortures and Liberty of Press. Open Letter to General Aramburu)
▪ 1963: El escritor y sus fantasmas (Translated by Asa Zatz in 1990 as The Writer in the Catastrophe of our Time.)
▪ 1968: Tres aproximaciones a la literatura de nuestro tiempo: Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Sartre (Three Approximations to the Literature of our Time: Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Sartre)
▪ 1976: Diálogos con Jorge Luis Borges (Dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges) (Edited by Orlando Barone.)
▪ 1979: Los libros y su misión en la liberación e integración de la América Latina (Books and their Mission in the Liberation and Integration of Latin America)
▪ 1988: Entre la letra y la sangre. Conversaciones con Carlos Catania (Between Letter and Blood. Conversations with Carlos Catania)
Other Works
▪ 1966: Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle. Cantar de Gesta (Romance of Juan Lavalle's Death. Cantar de gesta)
1984: Nunca más. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la desaparición de personas (Never Again. Report from the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons)
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