ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 26 1999 (IPS) - Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato has broken a 25-year literary silence with a new book which, while thumbed-down by some critics, has been selling faster than even the famous novels he wrote in the ’40s and ’50s.

In barely three weeks, 90,000 copies of ‘Antes del Fin’ have been sold in Argentina and, according to the publisher, there is still enough demand to warrant reprinting another 10,000 a week, alongside those published in Mexico (10,000), Spain (20,000), Colombia and Chile.

The work has been a bestseller ever since it first came out on Dec. 10. The publisher estimates that 2,000 copies a day are bought in Buenos Aires, and in some bookstores ‘Antes del Fin’ is sold out just two hours after it hits the shelves.

‘El Tunel’ (The Tunnel) and ‘Sobre Héroes y Tumbas’ (On Heroes and Tombs) – two of his previous works – had sold 27,000 and 45,000 copies, respectively, in a little over a month after they first hit the bookshelves. Since then these classics of Argentine literature have been re-issued permanently.

For the past six years, the 87-year-old author said he was writing his memoirs. More than a biography, however, his new book is an essay meant for the youth who, he says, keep him alive with their admiration.

Sabato devotes very little of its some 200 pages to his vicissitudes as a scientist – he has a doctorate in physics, but gave up science to devote himself to literature – as a writer or essayist, nor does he reveal much about his personal life.

Instead, he writes extensively on his critical view of the world, individualism, the secularization of technology, materialism, poverty, environmental degradation and other issues, and urges young people to keep up their vision of utopia.

Therein lies the key to the book’s commercial success. The youth see in Sabato a cultural reference, a lucid and coherent elder who, with his skepticism and nihilistic ideas, has become an idol, literary critic Alicia Martinez explained in an interview.

A broad spectrum of people had also been anxiously awaiting the publication of the book, even without having read ‘The Tunnel’ (1948) or ‘On Heroes and Tombs’ (1961), two of the three novels which made him world famous, she added.

Sabato is also the author of many essays, such as ‘El escritor y sus fantasmas’ (The Writer and His Ghosts) and ‘Uno y el Universo’ (One and the Universe), in which he develops his apocalyptic view of the modern world.

Sabato left the literary world to descend into the inferno – as he put it – in 1984, when he was appointed president of a commission that investigated forced disappearances during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

The ‘Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas’ (National Commission on Disappearances) collected thousands of testimonies of kidnapped persons, people who were tortured, detainees, children born in captivity and concentration camps.

These testimonies were later published in a book titled ‘Nunca Mas’ (Never Again).

The information the Commission collected was used to try and convict former dictators of gross violations of human rights, but they were pardoned later, something which, Sabato reveals in his new book, pained him deeply.

Sabato is idolised by millions of Argentines. “He is a symbol, more than a writer,” says fellow author Eduardo Gudino Kieffer.

His editors say TV audiences increase dramatically when he appears on programmes as a special guest, which he does rarely though he does respond when, for example, teachers or residents of poor neighbourhoods ask him to participate in protests.

One of the critics of his new book is Ana Maria Shua. “It a very mediated phenomenon,” says Shua, who feels Sabato was “opportunistic” to publish a book touted as probably his last.

Sabato, who was of the same generation as renowned Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, has always been a loner and has had few friends in the literary world, with the exception of late Franco- Algerian writer Albert Camus and Argentina’s Leopoldo Marechal.

For Sabato’s more benevolent critics, the problem for writers of Borges’ generation was that none came close to his genius and he thus overshadowed them. According to Alicia Martinez, Borges was prolific but the quality of his work was even, whereas Sabato yielded to the temptation of continuing to write even when he had run out of things to say.

She explained that even though critics rejected ‘Antes del Fin’, “Sabato’s hold on the middle class and the youth is incredible”, especially because of his commitment to human rights issues.

Martinez also indicated that people had been waiting anxiously for a new work by Sabato since, after publishing his last novel ‘Abbadon, el exterminador’ in 1974, he devoted himself to painting, but nevertheless remained one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers.

He himself believes he does not deserve so much recognition, although his declarations to that effect could be interpreted as false modesty.

Sabato won the Cervantes Prize, the most important award in Spanish literature, in 1974. He is also a holder of the Menendez y Pelayo award, and was often a candidate for the Nobel Prize – he recalls one occasion on which the president of the Swedish Academy praised his work, but said later that he had not written enough to be given the prize.

He has been much more affected by his critics in Argentina, as he hints in his new book, and it was they who discouraged him from continuing to write, in addition his own bitter fights with other writers, which he partly regrets.

Sabato seems to have waited until after the death of his wife Matilde to publish ‘Antes del Fin’. She died last year after a six- year illness, and the text was at the publisher’s immediately afterwards, completed with the help of assistants and proofreaders.

“I don’t want to die without saying these words: ‘I have faith in you’,” he says at the end of his book to the youth, whom he urges to have hope and solidarity and go back to believing in the utopia of a humanistic, sensitive world.