One of the giants of Latin American literature, Ernesto Sábato (1911-2011) lived most of his life in Buenos Aires, Argentina and periodically committed his own manuscripts to the flames, noting in one interview with wry satisfaction how fire is purifying. Fortunately, in addition to many essays, three of his novels survive. Before commenting on The Tunnel, his first novel written in 1948, some observations on his other two:On Heroes and Tombs, Sábato’s dark, brooding 500 pager includes an entire...

Sabato’s The Tunnel (1948) resembles Camus’ The Stranger (1942), for both are spare, short novels featuring murderer-protagonists as first person narrators, men who are profoundly alienated not only from their societies but also from any meaningful personal relationship. But the two protagonists are very different from each other too. Camus’ hero Meursault, a shipping clerk, is an unimaginative man alienated from his own emotions; Sabato’s hero Castel, a well-known painter, experiences his emoti...

"All our life would it be a succession of anonymous cries in a desert of indifferent stars?" With this intense novel of loneliness incommunicability, Ernesto Sabato projects his reader into the tunnel of the frightening thoughts of his narrator, Juan Pablo Castel, and it is not easy! One sinks into this story of a stormy love affair, to the rhythm of love/hate oscillations (the half-measure, in Castel, it does not exist), in the throes of an infernal, devouring, destructive jealousy. The narrato...

The Tunnel by Sabato, inspired by Dostoevsky and Kafka, is not just an intriguing novel but also an important existential classic. It cannot be totally denied that there are some similarities between Castel of this novel and Meursault from The Stranger but Castel is not too nihilistic in his views. The heart of Castel might have been frozen, but there was a drop or two of love - just enough to feed the birds.Solitude is often thought of as something self-warranted. Sometimes, even a man who buil...

Dark book. Inside the mind of a derranged obsessed man. Not a pleasant read but well written.

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. Meet Juan Pablo Castel. He's 38 years old, a painter. Cynical. A killer. In his mind, there are two kinds of people. Himself and the rest. He spends his whole life moving in what he describes as a tunnel, while evreyone else

A misanthrope? A case of morbid jealousy? A monster?There are times 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.The hero of The Tunnel is a known painter but he is a loner, he hates people and he is alienated from everyone. Some I knew by

El túnel = The Tunnel, Ernesto SábatoThe Tunnel is a dark, psychological novel, written by Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato, about a deranged traditional painting technique, Juan Pablo Castel, and his obsession with a woman. The story's title refers to the symbol for Castel's emotional and physical isolation from society, which becomes increasingly apparent as Castel proceeds to tell from his jail cell the series of events that enabled him to murder the only person capable of understanding him. M...

3,5 stars

Just as Opaque the Second Time RoundIn The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato has a mysogonistic, puerile, obsessive, apparently psychopathic murderer tell the reader his every thought about a folie a deux with his victim and its rationale. My first time through The Tunnel left me bewildered. Of what literary rather than ideological merit is this work? For whose edification or amusement is it meant? My original conclusion: It’s a difficult book to be interested in much less like. But I picked up on a hint b...

It was just about the stroke of dawn, lilacs started to bloom, the birds were singing along, the orchestra was about to embark on, I got up early and decided to plunge myself in books, I'd a few options- The Tunnel, Beauty and Sadness, and Requiem: A hallucination, I chose The Tunnel, for from excerpts of the book, it occurred to be an existential tale of an account of relationship of an artist-Juan Pablo Castel- with Maria Iribarne whom he murdered, I was listening to Shine on your crazy Diamon...

If you want to foreground a sociopath-misogynist-stalker's sense of urban isolation and alienation against a woman's prolonged emotional and physical abuse at the hands of the same person and call it existentialist literature, your choice. Just don't expect me to appreciate it.

You know I was going to review this book but then it occurred to me that I would never know if you have read my review. I mean yes, I do get likes but suppose people are liking them without reading them. Of course, why would anyone do that? Two possibilities seem to suggest themselves – either they want to make a fool of me by making me keep writing reviews that no one reads or to distract me from something. Of course, that in itself calls for a mass conspiracy because so many people from so man...

What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing it and conceives the notion that you and only you alone have perceived the true great meaning of this work you might find yourself cajoled, inveigled, drawn in, stalked obsessively, obsessed over night and day, belittled, berated, bewildered, bamboozled, brutalised and finally stabbed and killed in a blizzard of male rage in just exactly the same w...

Really wanted to nail this in one sitting, but still managed it in two, wow!, this still retains it's power to shock all these years later, disturbing and even funny, Sabato features possibly the most chilling ending I have come across to date. Narrated by an artist in jail (that being Juan Pablo Castel)who practically goes about stalking a woman named Maria after he spots her eying one of his canvases in a gallery. From this moment on he forces his way into her life, learning she has a blind hu...

It should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed María Iribarne.That is how the story unfolded itself. It began with that one sentence - a simple, staightforward confession. After I finished the novella, it felt like waking up from a dream. Not just a normal dream but a nightmarish one. The kind that leaves you dazed as its after effect.There was one person who could have understood me. But she was the very person I killed. It's no secret that Castel was the one...

One of the first things I did after coming back home from my summer trip, is grabbing Ernesto Sabato's Tunnel for the second time. I had first read it in early 2008. It was in my head throughout the summer. I felt that I have missed the book and I need to re-read it. By it, I mean its mood, its characters, its amiable yet aggressive narrative style. The Tunnel is simply a great novella. It talks about one of the main reasons behind literary production: human loneliness and the search for a conne...

Oh yeah, mid-20th-century existentialist novel. You’ll be forgiven if you open this book to a random page and think that you’re reading Sartre’s Nausea – but you’ll soon realize that it’s not as good as Nausea. There’s murder here, and it will remind you of the other famous existentialist novel – The Stranger – except that it’s not as good as that one either. But the message is all the same: Oh, what a heavy burden it is to find yourself living in a universe that is void of any meaning and purpo...

Hell with it; I'm giving everything five stars. I just finished reading this short novel by the Argentine, Ernesto Sábato. How can you not read a book that begins with this line:Bastará decir que soy Juan Pablo Castel, el pintor que mató a María Iribarne; supongo que el proceso está en el recuerdo de todos y que no se necesitan mayores explicaciones sobre mi persona.(Suffice it to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne; I suppose that the trial is still in everyon...

The significance of Sabato's title is one that I intuited even before it was clarified by the author. The novel begins abruptly : " - Suffice it to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne". The protagonist has obviously, something in common with Meursault - the character from Camus's " Stranger" : cynicism, isolation, contempt for all those unable to understand him. The narration is simple, everything being told at the first person, in the form of a confession.