Reviews

• I'm not a book critic and if you're on Amazon looking for how good a book is, you're definitely at the wrong place! I can only review on the quality of the print and the translation. I found the translation to be quite good, although you could tell this book was not written in English if you read it. The print was good and I was very happy with my purchase.

• In this, his first novel, Ernesto Sabato applies a sure hand to create a chilling tale of obsession and murder. THE TUNNEL takes the form of a first-person confessional narrative, one that unwinds at a finely controlled pace. There is little or no fat on the bones of the story. At a brisk 140 pages, divided into 39 chapters, the book can be read in one or two sessions. Concentrated attention to the diseased mind of the artist-confessor, Juan Pablo Castel, is the best way for you to experience Sabato's achievement. You will know from the start, from the swiftly sketched initial encounter between Castel and Maria Iribarne, that here are two lovers doomed to play out a fatal destiny. You expect their descent will be devastating. And it is. Their affair commences with a time-worn dance: attraction, tentative connections, daydreaming, fervent expectations, misunderstandings, jousting, desperate communications. Thinking back later on his crime, Castel recalls "how we are blinded by love, how magically love transforms reality." You come upon the first intimations of violence. A dread seizes you. Sabato is a master of the slow reveal. I was struck by the teasing manner in which he parcels out dialog between the lovers, and how he uses the attraction of their different temperaments (the determined and overly-analytical Castel versus the warm yet elusive Maria) as a means to keep us off-balance. We apprehensive readers are entrapped. We want to hear more from Maria, in her own words, unfiltered by the claustrophobic, maddeningly selfish perceptions of the narrator. When Maria finally speaks frankly to him of her desires, during a respite from the city at an estancia by the ocean ("I can't count the times," she tells Castel, "that I have dreamed of sharing this sea and this sky with you") -- the emotional effect is powerful. When it was first published in 1948 and championed by Albert Camus, THE TUNNEL was placed on the shelf occupied by contemporary existentialist literature. Certainly Sabato does bow in that direction, as when Castel's thoughts veer toward the philosophical: "There are times I feel 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, or others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again." But to the 21st-century reader such passages may sound like window-dressing. For today's reader, the philosophical may take a back seat to a superior claim of the psychological. That is to say, THE TUNNEL has become a case study. It is an examination -- or you might say a self-examination -- by a man suffering through deep psychological trauma. Castel boasts: "My brain is in constant ferment and, when I get nervous, ideas roil in a giddy ballet." Yet while he fancies himself a superior analytical being, we know better. He is paranoid, depressed, suicidal, a "borderline personality." In the final analysis it is these conditions that precipitate his downfall -- a descent plotted with masterful care by the author. (Please see photos of the book uploaded to the Customer Images portion of this product page, at the upper left.)

• Read the original in Spanish, got this one for my GF. Great book, psychological thriller with the spoiler at the beginning, but the insights and nihilism of Castel makes this book amazing. The only complain is a word censored in the English version.

• Everybody should read the book to understand how a man would be suffered when being forsaken by his lover. Before committed the crime the murderer had been " killed" by two lethal blows: one on his brain, and one on his heart .

• Juan Pablo Castel is a painter. At an exhibition of one of his paintings, he noticed that only one person, a young woman, focused on the feature of the painting that was for him its essential component. And thus began Castel's obsession with that woman, whose name was (not "is", because as Castel informs us on the first page of the novel, he murdered her) María Iribarne. The novel consists of Castel's first-person account, written in his jail cell, of the course of that obsession: how he searched all over Buenos Aires for her, then serendipitously found her and struck up an awkward conversation with her, learned that she was married to a blind man, against all logic entered into a love affair with her, repeatedly drove her off with his boorish behavior and cruel comments yet somehow always re-established communications and regained a measure of her good graces, all the while becoming more jealous, irrational, and abusive. In the early stages of the novel, Castel comes across as a hybrid of Dostoevsky's anonymous Underground Man and K. from Kafka's "The Castle". But as the story unfolds, Castel becomes more of a jerk (euphemism for the word that is the verboten synonym of "rectum") and more deranged than either the Underground Man or K. Also, in the early stages of the novel there are passages of comic absurdity, but as the novel progresses they become less frequent, and the novel becomes increasingly dark and, frankly, increasingly ugly. THE TUNNEL is tautly written. It is undeniably a powerful novel (actually, more a novella). There are noteworthy sentences. Example: "[L]ife is a process of constructing future memories." And there are a few arresting images or constructs, such as the one of the tunnel near the end of the book. My take on THE TUNNEL is that it is an elaborate allegory of human loneliness. Did I like it? Not particularly. Had it been twice as long I would have given up on it before the halfway mark. But what do I know? Reportedly, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham Greene all praised it upon its release in 1948, and I certainly would not pretend that my literary judgment is as informed or refined as theirs. But I will suggest that their better works have far more staying power than THE TUNNEL.

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