Sabato - The Tunnel

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Not for me

I thoroughly disliked this book. It is probably my own fault for ordering an "existential classic." I understand and have a good deal of sympathy with the existentialist notion that it is the responsibility of every individual to give meaning to his or her life, but I have never got on with most existentialist literature and wanted to have another try at finding out what people see in it. I thought that at least this wouldn't be the self-obsessed maunderings of another pretentious and self-regarding Frenchman and I was right - it isn't. Instead it is the self-obsessed maunderings of a pretentious and self-regarding Argentine.

The narrative consists of the thought processes, given in minute detail, of an artist with no regard for or understanding of others, who is socially completely inept and alienated from any other person. (Well, of course he is - it's an existentialist classic.) His own needs and desires are all that matter to him and this, coupled with a flawed and tortured internal logic, leads to the murder to which this is the confession. To give a small flavour of the tone of the book, the narrator sees a woman looking at one of his paintings in a certain way and, solely because of this, he instantly decides that he needs her desperately but doesn't speak to her. He tries to think about how to find her again:
"The girl, I could assume, was in the habit of visiting art exhibits. If I saw her there, I could stop beside her and, without too much awkwardness, start a conversation about one of the paintings.
"After examining the possibility in detail, I abandoned it. I never go to art exhibits." (The last sentence is in italics in the text.)

Now, I can understand the desire to convey that terrible inner awkwardness and the futile planning of casual meetings to try to overcome it, but why would an intelligent, logical character have to examine the possibility *in detail* before realising that he never goes to art exhibits on principle? Surely there must be some limits to inconsistency and absurdity even in existentialist classics. There is an awful lot of this sort of stuff which I found tedious in the extreme. At least in Camus's L'Étranger, for example, one genuinely does feel the alienation of the narrator and gain some insight into the human condition. Here we are presented with someone who seems like a deeply unpleasant and unreal caricature of a cross between the young Adrian Mole and the narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but with none of the human insight of either book and only a fraction of their literary merit.

I'm afraid I thought that the best thing about this book was that it is mercifully short. Although plenty of intelligent, discerning people have liked and admired it, I certainly didn't.