If one is in the mood for speculation there's a lot of material to work upon in ["The Outsider"]…. It is ostensibly the story of a crime, and the narrator, who begins, "I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne …," is presumably going to tell all. He does and he doesn't, and it is what he doesn't tell which provides the speculative possibilities. He mainly doesn't tell about Maria Iribarne, a fadedly beautiful inhabitant of Buenos Aires, and if you can find this tale of passion credible at all you will want to know more about her. (p. 18)

What you do get to know about her concerns some vague, inner loneliness that she always is aware of, and since Castel, too, has this kind of loneliness (characterized by a feeling of being on the outside of things) they become soul mates very quickly indeed.

This morbid pair then proceeds to have a subtle and morbid relationship, complicated all the more by Maria's elusiveness and Castel's psychopathic imaginings. You're rather relieved, on the whole, when he finally plunges that carving knife into her breast.

The writing itself is felicitous enough to keep one reading with a certain fascination (perhaps, you think, Maria will come clear in the end)…. At its best this sort of thing would fall into the tour de force classification. One can only note that Ernesto Sábato is a writer of considerable ability, hung, unfortunately, at the moment in some limbo between Albert Camus and Graham Greene. (pp. 18, 41)