For once, this is a well-known Latin-American book that doesn't get cited as a precursor of the "Boom". We're not in magic-realist territory here at all, or even in the realm of political history: this is a full-on existentialist novella in the Camus tradition, where we never leave the disturbing world of the inside of the protagonist's head.

Like Camus' most famous protagonist, the painter Castel is a convicted murderer reflecting on the circumstances of his crime. Falling in love with María, the one person with whom he has established real communication through one of his paintings, has broken through his radical alienation from society for a while, but then he starts to become obsessed with the idea that her love for him is not exclusive. Castel is not a sympathetic person, and it's not a very pleasant psychological journey we share with him, but Sábato doesn't give us much choice: we're compelled to stay with him to the end, even though we know where this is going. Powerful stuff, which has a lot of relevant things to say about the way we interact with the world even if we find the premise of the inevitability of jealousy-killing unpleasant and artificial. ( )

Scores points for its existential viewpoints and its dark ponderings that swings between immense, obsessive love and how small our lives are in the grand scheme of things. Where it fell short for me was in its misogyny and sociopathy of its narrator, a man who essentially stalks a woman and ends up killing her. There was a distastefulness about this perspective, and his intellectual picking apart things in everyday life. It needed to have some other layer or gone in a different direction with its story for me to enjoy it.

Quotes:
On isolation:
“…and that the whole story of the passageways [parallel tunnels] was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naively believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, the unbounded world of those who did not live in tunnels; and perhaps out of curiosity she had approached one of my strange windows, and had glimpsed the spectacle of my unredeemable solitude, or had been intrigued by the mute message, the key, of my painting.”

On lost love:
“More than ever I felt that she would never be wholly mine, and that I must resign myself to fragile moments of communion, as sad and insubstantial as the memory of certain dreams or the joy of certain musical passages.”

On meaninglessness:
“There are times when I feel that nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.
Was that really it? I sat pondering the absence of meaning. Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?”

And:
“I watched out the train window as the train sped toward Buenos Aires. We passed near a small homestead: a woman standing in the shade of a thatched roof looked up at the train. An opaque thought crossed my mind: ‘I am seeing that woman for the first and last time. I will never in my lifetime see her again.’ My thoughts floated aimlessly, like a cork down an uncharted river. For a moment they bobbed around the woman beneath the thatch. What did she matter to me? But I could not rid myself of the thought that, for an instant, she was a part of my life that would never be repeated; from my point of view it was as if she were already dead: a brief delay of the train, a call from inside the house, and that woman would never have existed in my life.” ( )

8432230030

No me gustó ni un poquito ya en la primera lectura, cuando era adolescente y era un libro que si te movías en ciertos círculos "tenías" que leer, ni cuando intenté una segunda lectura hace pocos años (esa vez ni siquiera lo terminé). Aprendí con los años a que me importe un bledo los "debe", leo lo que me da la santa gana y al que le guste bien y al que no también.

Respeto enormemente a Sábato, el hombre público. Pero como escritor (de ficción al menos, tengo algunos ensayos pendientes e lectura) no conecto ni con su estilo ni con su pesimismo. ( )

De los primeros libros que leí. ( )