Sobre héroes y tumbas

Sobre héroes y tumbas (Booket, 2011)
by Ernesto Sabato
Argentina, 1961

Since Sobre héroes y tumbas [On Heroes and Tombs], once considered to be an undisputed classic of the Boom decade and now seemingly struggling just to maintain its mere "disputed classic" status among Lat Am lit fans not named Ignacio Echevarría, was something like 3/4 "pretty good" + 1/4 "laughably bad" according to the uncanny but always accurate arbiter of excellence calculations I worked out on scraps of paper over the course of two calendar years, this post is going to have to be somewhat more complicated than I'd originally intended.  Damn you, Sabato!  A 508-page chunkster that intermittently intercalates a dry 1840s historical narrative having to do with Argentina's civil wars into a gothic 1950s Buenos Aires crime story in which the daughter of one of the leading families of the city decides to burn her father and herself to death in a premeditated act at least partially related to the family's genetic predisposition to mental illness, the novel is an ambitious but sprawling mess which--at its best--actually delivers an emotionally and psychologically convincing story of star-crossed teenaged lovers Martín and Alejandra set against a lugubrious and politically turbulent Baires backdrop.  At its worst, as in the 150-page first-person "Informe sobre ciegos" ["Report on the Blind"] said to have been prepared by Alejandra's father and completed on the night of his mysterious death, the novel offers up a cheesy and over the top example of Sabato trying too hard to impersonate the voice of a cruel, paranoid, incest-driven madman and failing badly.  Which is too bad because, the dimestore surrealism and Dostoevsky-wannabe bits aside, Sabato's use of Buenos Aires as a setting feels authentic and is occasionally utterly compelling--here, in this bit involving a Borges cameo, for example, and later on, when Roberto Arlt gets namedropped in the middle of a wild screed focused on immigrants and anarchists before the coup against Yrigoyen in 1930.  In other words, an OK read but hardly the big deal it's sometimes made out to be except in snatches.  (Booket)

Borges (l) and Sabato at the Bar Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, Bs.As.

A dissenting opinion

Ignacio Echevarría has this to say about Sobre héroes y tumbas in his entry on the work on page 49 of Los libros esenciales de la literatura en español: narrativa de 1950 a nuestros días:  "El tiempo ha ido menguando los apasionados fervores que en su momento suscitó esta novela, que sin embargo mantiene --para los lectores más jóvenes y para los que vuelven a serlo cuando recuerdan la lectura que hicieron de ella-- el encanto de su propio exceso, de su ambición descontrolada, de sus énfasis dostoievskianos, de su solemnidad, de su arrebato, de su desgarro; de todo aquello, en definitiva, que despierta en la actualidad una condescendiente reprobación" ["Time has been diminishing the intense fervor that this novel provoked in its heyday, which nonetheless still maintains--for younger readers and for those who become young again when they remember their reading of it--the delight of its own excess, of its unrestrained ambition, of its Dostoyevskian emphases, of its solemnity, of its fury, of its impudence: of all that which, in short, nowadays arouses a condescending condemnation"].

Borges, a Character in a Novel by Sabato

Just had to share this with those of you who participated in and/or otherwise remember the Jorge Luis Borges group reads we did last year and those who, like Amateur Reader, Roberto Bolaño and me, profess more than a passing interest in the "extraordinary riches" of Argentinean literature.  So I was reading Ernesto Sabato's 1961 Sobre héroes y tumbas [On Heroes and Tombs, here translated by Helen R. Lane in what I believe is an out of print 1981 edition put out by David R. Godine] the other day when the following previously nondescript Buenos Aires description really grabbed my attention:

They were walking down the Calle Perú; grabbing Martín by the arm, Bruno pointed a man out to him who was walking in front of them, leaning on a cane.

"Borges."

Now, although I had read somewhere that Borges made a cameo in the novel, I had somehow managed to forget that was coming by the time I got to this point almost a couple of hundred pages in.  What followed was classic, though, and worth the wait for the increasingly unflattering portrait of Borges that initially emerges:

When they drew closer, Bruno said hello to him.  Martín found himself shaking a tiny hand, with scarcely any bones or strength in it.  The features of the man's face seemed to have been sketched in and then to have been half rubbed out with an eraser.  Borges mumbled something, acknowledging the introduction.

"Martín's a friend of Alejandra Vidal Olmos's," Bruno said.

"Caramba, caramba...Alejandra...that's fine."

He raised his eyebrows, observed Martín with watery blue eyes and an abstract cordiality addressed to no one in particular, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Bruno asked him what he was writing.

"Well, caramba...," he mumbled, smiling a half-guilty, half-wicked smile, with that air that Argentine peasants assume, an air of modest irony, a mixture of secret arrogance and apparent diffidence, every time someone admires one of their horses or their ability to do fine leatherwork.  "Caramba...well, in a word...trying to write a page or two that's something more than a scribble, eh, eh?..."

And he mumbled something else, accompanied by a series of clownish facial tics.

And as they walked on toward Rinaldini's, Bruno imagined Méndez saying sarcastically: A lecturer for snooty women's clubs!  But everything was much more complicated than Méndez thought (171).

Sabato's apparent comedic malevolence aside, what makes these details so delicious to me--so Argentinean, if you will, within the context of Argentinean literature as a whole--is that this unexpected description of a chance encounter with Borges then segueways into a discussion of what Argentine identity and letters are all about.  Introducing Borges as a character isn't a cheap stunt or a sideshow act:

"They say he's not very Argentine," Martín ventured to remark.

"What else could he be but Argentine?  He's a typical national product.  Even his so-called Europeanism is national.  A European is not Europeanist: he's simply European."

"Do you think he's a great writer?"

Bruno pondered the question for some time.

"I don't know.  What I'm certain of is that his prose is the most remarkable of any being written in Spanish today.  But his style is too precious for him to be a great writer.  Can you imagine Tolstoy trying to dazzle his readers with an adverb when it's the question of the life or death of one of his characters?  But not everything in Borges's works is Byzantine: far from it.  There's something Argentine in his best things: a certain nostalgia, a certain metaphysical sadness..."

He walked along in silence for a time.

"The fact is that people say all sorts of ridiculous things about what Argentine literature ought to be.  The important thing is for it to be profound.  All the rest is just an added fillip.  And if it isn't profound it's useless to introduce gauchos or colorful picaresque rascals into the picture.  The most representative writer in Elizabethan England was Shakespeare.  Yet many of his works don't even have an English setting" (172).

After a pause in which Bruno makes fun of those who would deny Argentina's European roots and yet touches on the situation in which Latin Americans find themselves to be the inhabitants of a "different, violent continent," the discussion of Borges opens the door for a rant on the notion of originality in literature.  Love this talky book stuff:

"So critics want total and absolute originality, do they?  Such a thing doesn't exist.  Neither in art nor in anything else.  Everything is built on what has gone before.  Nothing that is human is perfectly pure and pristine.  The Greek gods too were hybrids and were infected (so to speak) with Oriental and Egyptian religions.  There's a little passage in The Mill on the Floss in which a woman tries on a hat in front of a mirror: and it's Proust.  What I mean to say is, it's the seed of Proust.  All the rest is simply a process of development.  One touched with genius, cancerous almost, but in the final analysis simply a process of development.  The same thing is true of one of Melville's stories, called Bertleby or Bartleby or something like that.  When I read it I was impressed by its Kafkaesque atmosphere.  And that's the way it always is.  We're Argentines, for example, even when we reject our own country, as Borges frequently does.  Especially when he repudiates it with real fury, the way Unamuno repudiates Spain; the way violent atheists put bombs in a church, that being their way of believing in God.  The true atheists are those who are indifferent, those who are cynics.  And what we might call an atheistic attitude toward this native land of ours is to be found among cosmopolitans, individuals who live no differently here than they would in Paris or London--they live in a country as though it were a hotel.  But let's be fair: Borges is not one of them.  I think that in a certain way his heart aches for his country, despite the fact that he doesn't have the sensitivity or the generosity, of course, for it to ache for his country the way the heart of a day laborer in the fields or a worker in a meat-freezing plant does.  And that explains his lack of grandeur, his inability to understand and feel the whole of the country, including all its deep-rooted, complex rottenness.  When we read Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy on the other hand we feel that total understanding of the human soul" (173).

One brief Roberto Arlt commentary, another extended Borges discussion, and about fifty pages later, young protagonist Martín will feel the full brunt of the complex rottenness of the country when he's a witness to the carnage of the 1955 aerial bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo.  Can't wait to get back to the rest of Sobre héroes y tumbas which, despite some ups and downs from a tonal standpoint, is giving me the sense that Sabato's playing for keeps.  Not bad for a back-up book, eh, eh?