As an existentialist his work was contemporaneous with, rather than influenced by, figures across the Atlantic such as Camus and Sartre. Both Frenchmen admired his writing, as did Graham Greene, Thomas Mann and, later, Salman Rushdie.
Ernest Sabato
A new “boom” of Latin American writers, including the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, were also influenced by Sábato, taking his style on to what became known as “magic realism”.
His reputation as an author was assured when, aged 72, Sábato was asked to look into the disappearances of thousands of Argentines under the military regimes of 1976-83. Having been appointed in 1983 by the new democratically-elected president, Raul Alfonsin, he chaired a commission whose report detailed the abductions, tortures or murders of close to 9,000 people.
It was not this that proved so shocking, however, as most Argentines already knew of the deaths and in fact believed the actual toll to be closer to 30,000.
What resonated instead was Sábato’s sudden and public judgment on recently untouchable demagogues and the fact that such figures now faced prosecution – although most of them would eventually be granted amnesty. As a result of Sábato’s work, democracy, for the first time in generations, became tangible to most Argentines.
Sábato’s weighty document was titled Nunca Más (Never Again) but became widely known as “The Sábato Report”. As a cornerstone of the newly-established democracy, it helped efface the nation’s pariah status and so contributed to subsequent economic growth. Sábato explained that his figure of 8,960 desaparecidos (disappeared) was as much as his commission could prove during its nine-month investigation. Completing the report, he said, was “like a slow descent into Hell”.
Ernesto Roque Sábato was born in Rojas, in the pampas of Buenos Aires province, on June 24 1911, the 10th of 11 children of Italian immigrant parents whose families had moved to Calabria from Albania. His father, Francisco, started a bakery which he named Francisco Sábato & Sons while his two boys were still at school, and graduated to owning the local flour mill. Ernesto was introverted, had loud nightmares and regularly sleepwalked.
He graduated from the National University of La Plata with a PhD in Physics in 1938 before travelling to Paris on a research fellowship in atomic radiation at the Curie Institute. “I assisted in breaking the uranium atom,” he once wrote, a “race” which was “being disputed by three laboratories. I thought it was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
In Paris he fell in with artists of the Surrealist movement: “I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning and spent my nights in bars with the delirious surrealists.” But his daytime work left him feeling “empty” and, after a further spell as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he decided to quit Physics. “War was approaching, a war in which science was going to be the instrument of mechanised slaughter.” He decided he could have more influence as a writer.
Over subsequent decades “el Maestro”, as his compatriots came to refer to him, wrote thousands of influential essays, short stories and magazine articles. But he published only three novels. Those were enough, though, to win him the Cervantes Prize, the most coveted award among Spanish-language writers, in 1984. His lack of published output, he explained, was because he had a tendency to burn in the afternoon what he had written in the morning – it was not that he was making a point of “being existentialist”. He suffered from depression – nothing really mattered, good or bad. “It may be because I considered that all my work was imperfect, impure, and I found that fire was purifying,” he once said.
It was Sábato’s first novel, El Túnel (The Tunnel, 1948), that brought him to the attention of writers such as Camus and Sartre. A dark, psychological novel relating the confessions of a painter, Juan Pablo Castel, who has murdered the only woman who ever understood him, it is considered a existentialist classic. Camus praised its “arid intensity” and ensured that it was published in French, while it has recently been republished by Penguin Modern Classics. His later books, Of Heroes and Tombs (1962) and The Angel of Darkness (1974), put him on a par, in the eyes of Spanish-language critics, with his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, although the latter would gain more international fame. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once said: “Sábato’s writing shows greater vitality and imagination that anything since the great Russian novels of the 19th century.”
In 1987 France recognised Sábato’s work by appointing him a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.
Ernesto Sábato’s wife, Matilde (née Kusminsky-Richter), whom he married in 1936, died in 1998. His eldest son, Jorge, died in a road accident in 1995. He is survived by his younger son, Mario, a well-known filmmaker, and his companion of several years, Elvira González Fraga.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8505537/Ernesto-Sabato.html
Ernesto Roque Sábato was born in Rojas, in the pampas of Buenos Aires province, on June 24 1911, the 10th of 11 children of Italian immigrant parents whose families had moved to Calabria from Albania. His father, Francisco, started a bakery which he named Francisco Sábato & Sons while his two boys were still at school, and graduated to owning the local flour mill. Ernesto was introverted, had loud nightmares and regularly sleepwalked.
He graduated from the National University of La Plata with a PhD in Physics in 1938 before travelling to Paris on a research fellowship in atomic radiation at the Curie Institute. “I assisted in breaking the uranium atom,” he once wrote, a “race” which was “being disputed by three laboratories. I thought it was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
In Paris he fell in with artists of the Surrealist movement: “I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning and spent my nights in bars with the delirious surrealists.” But his daytime work left him feeling “empty” and, after a further spell as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he decided to quit Physics. “War was approaching, a war in which science was going to be the instrument of mechanised slaughter.” He decided he could have more influence as a writer.
Over subsequent decades “el Maestro”, as his compatriots came to refer to him, wrote thousands of influential essays, short stories and magazine articles. But he published only three novels. Those were enough, though, to win him the Cervantes Prize, the most coveted award among Spanish-language writers, in 1984. His lack of published output, he explained, was because he had a tendency to burn in the afternoon what he had written in the morning – it was not that he was making a point of “being existentialist”. He suffered from depression – nothing really mattered, good or bad. “It may be because I considered that all my work was imperfect, impure, and I found that fire was purifying,” he once said.
It was Sábato’s first novel, El Túnel (The Tunnel, 1948), that brought him to the attention of writers such as Camus and Sartre. A dark, psychological novel relating the confessions of a painter, Juan Pablo Castel, who has murdered the only woman who ever understood him, it is considered a existentialist classic. Camus praised its “arid intensity” and ensured that it was published in French, while it has recently been republished by Penguin Modern Classics. His later books, Of Heroes and Tombs (1962) and The Angel of Darkness (1974), put him on a par, in the eyes of Spanish-language critics, with his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, although the latter would gain more international fame. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once said: “Sábato’s writing shows greater vitality and imagination that anything since the great Russian novels of the 19th century.”
In 1987 France recognised Sábato’s work by appointing him a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.
Ernesto Sábato’s wife, Matilde (née Kusminsky-Richter), whom he married in 1936, died in 1998. His eldest son, Jorge, died in a road accident in 1995. He is survived by his younger son, Mario, a well-known filmmaker, and his companion of several years, Elvira González Fraga.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8505537/Ernesto-Sabato.html
No comments:
Post a Comment