Heralded by Albert Camus and Thomas Mann and widely translated, "The Tunnel" is the brief, obsessive, sometimes delirious confession of a convicted murderer. Although Sábato has been a passionate and voluble essayist throughout the intervening decades, he has been less prolific as a novelist. "On Heroes and Tombs," first published—to worldwide acclaim—20 years ago (we in the English-speaking world are the last to get the news), is his second novel, and there is only one other, "Abaddon, the Exterminator," which came out in 1974 and later won the prestigious French "Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger."

Yet, for all his reputation, Sábato stands apart from most of the writers of the "Boom"—and for good reason. Not only does he not participate in their communal voice, he is at war with it. He calls such writing "gratuitous" fiction, effete and superficial, a sophisticated ivory-tower pastime. He has no interest in technical virtuosity for its own sake—"as if man's life were a game!"—and refuses to preoccupy himself with the "beauty" of his prose.

Not surprisingly, his countryman Borges is his particular target. Though he grudgingly accepts Borges as a poet, he is enraged by his prose. He even contrives to have two of his characters in "On Heroes and Tombs" encounter Borges on the street in Buenos Aires, and after a playful caricature of his "clownish tics," his face that "seemed to have been sketched in and then to have been half rubbed out with an eraser" and his "air of modest irony, a mixture of secret arrogance and apparent diffidence," they go off and assault Borges's writing…. (pp. 1, 25)

What Sábato wants is a literature that is "naked" and profound, "created with blood," concerned with universal metaphysical themes and the "extreme existential situations of solitude and death." Apprehension of the whole. "Cosmovisions" that will save the soul. His great model is Dostoyevsky, "a tortured writer for whom style is less important than truth" and who was not afraid to face up to "the problem of Good and Evil." Writers are teachers, prophets, saints, martyrs or they are nothing.

Thus one of the "heroes" of the title of this book, as one might suppose, is the author himself. Perhaps, in a sense, the only one.

There are four principal characters in "On Heroes and Tombs" (also four parts or "movements"—the book has a classic symphonic or sonata design): The heroine Alejandra, a young boy in love with her named Martín, her mad father Fernando and a friend of all three named Bruno. And all three of the men (with Alejandra as the mystery at the center) represent, transparently and self-consciously, various aspects of Sábato himself….

Fernando even shares the author's birth date, and thus, like Sábato, would have been celebrating his 70th birthday this summer had not Alejandra, alas, on the night of June 24, 1955, shot her father and then locked herself in with his dead body and set the place on fire.

I give nothing away. This is how the book begins: with a "police report" (not really: it's just the author in another transparent disguise) regarding the aforesaid tragedy and the sub-sequent discovery of Fernando's curious document, "Report on the Blind," which we are told "lends itself to certain interpretations that throw light on the crime and make the hypothesis of an act of madness less plausible than another more sinister, more obscure, explanation."

Now I will give something away. This is an effort at classic tragedy. The "more sinister, more obscure explanation," though it is never mentioned aloud, is incest. (p. 25)

[Fernando] describes his own life in terms not of its pleasures, but of its psychological, moral and metaphysical crises, all of which he seems to have confronted uncompromisingly but without much humor….

Alejandra, the complex and intriguing epileptic "dragon-princess," is the book's major achievement…. Though the first two sections, or movements—that is, the first half of the book, up to her death by fire—are largely from Martín's point of view, it is she who dominates them, setting their sometimes agitated, but mostly anguished and melancholic mood, a figure at once particular and recognizable, yet at the same time larger than life, almost fabulous, archetypal, so much so that the historical June 1955 sacking and burning of the Buenos Aires churches by Peronist shock troops is able to serve as a mere symbolic prefigurement of her own more devastating private fire a couple of nights later.

The third movement, dissonant and turbulent, is the "Report on the Blind," the so-called novel-within-a-novel written by the paranoid Fernando, a man who entertained himself as a child by catching sparrows and poking needles in their eyes and who now finds himself persecuted by an insane fear of a conspiracy of the blind. This bit of fantasy is said to be Sábato's tribute to surrealism—which taught him as a troubled young scientist in Paris that realism to be realism must embrace the Irrational—and is perceived by many around the world as his most brilliant and imaginative (some say excessively so) accomplishment. Not so. There is a rather remarkable copulation at the end of the report, not unlike that war of the wizards in Disney's "The Sword in the Stone," but on the whole this tediously obsessive set piece suffers from a lack, not an excess, of imagination.

Nor, as it turns out, is "On Heroes and Tombs" a tragedy, for in the final section—melancholic in tone, contemplative, purged of the violent contradictions of Alejandra—Martín is rescued from doom's implacable cycle by what Sábato calls his "metaphysics of hope," the argument that the very fact that man hopes and loves is a kind of proof of a "Hidden Meaning of Existence" and even, yes, of the Immortality of the Soul. Martín chooses life over death—as we might, given the opportunity, choose laughter, say, or delight over angst—and joins up with a trucker driving south to cold, clean Patagonia….

Whatever it may lack in imaginative play or originality of thought, "On Heroes and Tombs," with its impassioned self-explorations and its "fanatic obsession" to communicate them, will remain as a valued testimony to that life. (p. 26)