On Heroes and Tombs

...By verbal montage a la Eisenstein - sometimes within phrases, sometimes within sentences, paragraphs, or whole sections - Sabato coordinates time, personality, and action as precisely calculated in a deterministic way as that in any of the daringly innovative films of Nicholas Roeg, but without ever permitting the correlation to dim the histrionics or illumine the meaning falsely...

...To coordinate this flaring hallucination, as massively compacted as Freud's theoretically compressed dreams, Sabato orders a random Jungian repetitiveness where not only does the individual repeat the pattern of the race but the individuals repeat the patterns of each other...

...Many more readings will have to conflict before we can assess the final value of this grand novel for us, readings that will have to account for its belated quality, its excess...

...The second is Martin's (read, maybe, San Martin, Argentine hero of Chile's and Peru's liberation) for Alejandra (try substituting, sometimes, Argentina), convoluted in the third, Bruno's, which reflects the Argentine infatuation and disillusionment with what appears to be the country (Alejandra) but develops into the self-discovery of an obsessive love for the country's past (Alejandra's mother, Georgina), which like all histories embalms the traitor alongside the hero...

...All Sabato's characters inhabit a novel and a nation of which they (and we) can say...

...He dreams a world where we know that the people we see both are and are not who they are because they are much more, just as their words and gestures are...

...Add to this memorializing literary work the publisher's handsome and solid binding, beautifully legible type, and considerate use of acid-free paper - as well as the bravery of a small house in welcoming such a grand but often rejected guest - and you have the deliverance of a novel that is truly commemorative and auspicious...

...And all too rare in these days of twenty-dollar fiction...

...So various and complex, the book brilliantly entices misreadings of itself - one of which misperceives an attack on Borges, who figures as a character - and these misreadings compose an atmosphere for the reader equivalent to that of the people in the novel, which aims at nothing less than being the history of a nation preserved in the strata of fierce obsessions...

...So much passion - personal, patriotic, and even psychotic - makes for operatic gesture and language, even when synthesized through the existential cliche of alienation...

...He has invented an organized system where order is the hardest thing to come by - again as in the films of Roeg...

...this age-old valley, this American loneliness, this nameless despair that torments us amid this chaos, in this fight between brothers...

...an existentialist essay scattered between the events...

...a country that as yet we had no clear idea of, a country that even today we still have no really clear idea of - what it is exactly, how far it extends, who it really belongs to...

...The experience of reading it is at once wild, hypnotizing, and disturbing...

...You may read that final scene, with Martin heading south, as the hope of the future for Argentina...

...Thus, at the end, when Martin abandons Buenos Aires to head for the crystalline coldness of Patagonia, Sabato even more closely intercuts scenes from the northward flight of defeated heroes in Argentina's 19th-century civil wars...

...Furthermore, we are getting the novel in a translation that itself constitutes an edition, so redeeming and perceptive has been the work of Helen R. Lane, who modulates the inherently high-key rhetoric of the Spanish into rhythms and tonalities attuned to English...

...Reducible to a simple though enigmatic combination of events and characters, On Heroes and Tombs also bulges to dimensions both philosophic and metaphysical - and complicatedly esthetic...

...On this armature, Sabato constructs a story as vastly lurid as Duel in the Sun...

...But, finally, after the first readings when you are overwhelmed by the gust of the book, Sabato's achievement is clear...

...Best of all, the monument so constituted not only imposed but celebrates original power and reflects genuine honor...

...and when the big books of the 1960s' boom in Latin American fiction were being translated, Sabato found himself exactly in the position of his English title: an outsider whose principal novel malingered in English through disastrous trial translations and publishing scuffles while it became one of the best-known books in Latin America and was translated into Italian, French, and German...

...Until then, On Heroes and Tombs rises as a great testimonial to its author and its nation's literature, which has produced such a drilling counterpoint in the complementary fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato...

...Little hollow pomp in the circumstances of delayed appearance for this book published in Argentina during 1961...

...In other words, we are not getting merely the novel but an edition, including changes and deletions, Sabato tells us, that will be used in any further edition of the book...

...The first is Sabato's, freely confessed in the novel's foreword where he explains that he writes "to free himself of an obsession that is not clear even to himself...

...an assaultive critique of pure reason: and allegories as available to interpretations as there are subtleties and coarseness in the structure of the book and behavior of its characters...

...The twenty-year wait to see On Heroes and Tombs into English has been an inexplicable and at times despairing one for Sabato, who nevertheless emerges as a hero in this 1981 version, which he has altered and annotated significantly...

...but, given the determining and insistent alignment of past with present history in the book, that would be to ignore Sabato's informed pessimism as well as Argentina's continuing history...

...Sabato is the great articulator of the nightmare in prose...

...For the reader, On Heroes and Tombs offers, then, an occasion of literary history and a privileged look at a major literary monument that predicts in changed vocabulary the present condition of Argentina's tortured state...

...Martin re-enacts, as he has throughout the book, the frustrated honor and doomed quest of all the book's heroes, who have had to choose their actions in a world that includes the underworld of traitors, sewers, and corruption...

...it is not stylistic (that's why the translation is such a tour deforce) but architectonic...

...Sabato, meanwhile, gleaned more fame as well as the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger for his third novel, Abaddon el Exter-minador (published in 1974 but still untranslated into English), putting him into a circle with authors like Garcia Mar-quez, Grass, and Solzhenitsyn...

...The novel's armature is a love affair between a mysteriously idiosyncratic girl, Alejandra, and her hopefully disillusioned lover, Martin, chiefly as seen through the mediating intelligence of Bruno (who once thought he loved the girl only to discover that he really loved her mother), and refracted through the gothic paranoia of a "Report on the Blind" by Alejandra's father, a narrative incubus on the novel who combines an Argentinian Undergroundman with the Grand Inquisitor in the context of a sewerish Inferno...

...That was thirteen years after Sabato's novella El tunel claimed world-wide praise from writers so diverse as Thomas Mann, Graham Greene, and Albert Camus, and some years before it passed into dubious status here as a required text in advanced Spanish courses, where the directness of its language and existential statement render it, precisely, a text rather than a work of literature...

...this cruel land, soaked with the blood of so many Argentines...

...Translated as The Outsider, El tunel took Sabato almost nowhere with the English-speaking world...

...Ronald Christ THE PUBLICATION in English of Ernesto Sabato's masterwork, On Heroes and Tombs, is a monumental event: monumental for author, translator, publisher, and reader alike...