On Heroes and Tombs

Ernesto Sabato · 1911–2011 · Argentina

Originally Sobre héroes y tumbas (Spanish) · translated by Helen Lane

Why it matters

A young man's obsessive love collides with his lover's family's buried secrets, opening onto a hallucinatory 'Report on the Blind' that reads like a novel within the novel. Sabato's masterpiece: existentialist dread at its fullest scale.

At a glance

A hallucinatory embedded novella interrupts and destabilizes the main plot's already dense structure.