Ernesto Sabato is one of the greatest writers of our time. Although, for reasons that make his life even more interesting, he is certainly not a typical writer of our time. Sabato is the actor of one of the craziest transfers of the XNUMXth century.
How else to call such a situation: the man was one of the most important young physicists in the time before the Second World War. Collaborator of Irene Žolio Kiri, representative of the "noblest" scientific lineage of the twentieth century. He participated in numerous important projects, which very early placed him in the circle of possible candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Such a scientific biography, in fact, necessarily ends - with that or some similar recognition. But Sabato, it seems, has always had a passion, so literary after all, for - an unexpected twist.
The experience of the Second World War, although there was no war in Argentina, but a universal spirit does not measure everything from its backyard, changed Sabat's attitude towards science. Until then, and he was not the only one, he naively believed that the measure of knowing the world, that the development of science would simply abolish savagery and primitivism. Also, that the scope of science will serve exclusively for such purposes. But that didn't happen. On the contrary. The biggest global slaughter since the beginning of the world took place. With gained insights into the quantum world, relativistic paradoxes, numerous discoveries that made life easier... The result was - an unprecedented simplification of Death. Sabato saw this as a Defeat. The biggest possible.
And, instead of physics, he turned to metaphysics. And that in a century that will try to reduce metaphysical concepts to - threshing of empty straw.
Sabat's twist is one of the rare counter-punches of metaphysics. As early as 1948, he published the cult and now quite legendary novel The Tunnel (El Tunel). "A trip to hell on the dinosaur of logic", as he formulated the intention of this novel in a later text. A story that confuses and enchants at the same time. Isn't that the essence of seduction. This novel is a worldwide success. The appearance of the great writer is welcomed by the greatest literary authorities of the age – Thomas Mann and Albert Camus, among others.
After thirteen years, in 1961 he published one of the greatest Latin American novels - About heroes and graves (Sobre heroes y tumbas). The largest segment of this novel, the famous Report on the Blind is one of the pinnacles of modern prose - an ode to paranoia, its magnificent (de)construction. A masterful game that takes your breath away. This novel appeared in our language in the mid-eighties, as part of one of the best editions published in the era of flourishing SFRY socialism - in two rounds of five books each, the best Latin American novels of authors we usually call the First Generation of Boomers were published.
His third novel is Abaddon, the angel of destruction (Abaddon el exterminador, 1974), a testament intoned, although the author will live another 37 years, until last Saturday. After the novel, he wrote essays, and as an indisputable moral authority, he was appointed, during the era of President Raul Alfonsin, as the head of the commission that investigated the disappearances of people during the military junta dictatorship.
However, he did not receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Although he remains, probably the only man who was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics and Literature. There is no doubt that he deserved at least this literary Nobel, but he had one small problem - he was Argentine. Waging his ridiculous war against Borges, Artur Lundqvist, then the first man of the Swedish Academy, "put all the other Argentinians on ice." So the most important national literature after the Second World War still does not have its Nobel. And the last of the holy trinity of literature died - after Cortásar and Borges, Sabato also passed away. Maybe now "Lundqvist's curse" will be removed from Argentine writers.
Of course, he had his faults. He was cruelly unfair to Cortasar and his Schools, he considered it to be an overrated novel, calling Cortasar's procedure "Byzantism", which he wanted to emphasize, the alleged unnecessary complications of the marvelous Huli. But he should be forgiven for such a delusion - he certainly did not say it out of fear or envy.
Sabato died at the age of one hundred. It is almost certain that no one from his generation attended his funeral.
He and Borges were the two poles of modern Argentine literature. Infinitely different, they always had a genuine respect for each other. That is why the book of their conversations is so interesting. One good detail – while Borges explains his infantile love for the other side of La Plata, Sabato says resignedly: "All countries are more or less imaginary, above all your Uruguay, Borges..."
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