The Tunnel: the confession of a man who reasons everything through
A review of The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato's short novel in which a painter confesses a crime and drags the reader deep into his obsession.
Some novels open with a crime and spend the rest of their pages hunting for the culprit. The Tunnel opens with the culprit introducing himself. In the very first line, the painter Juan Pablo Castel announces that he is the man who killed María Iribarne, and from then on there is no mystery left to solve. All that remains is to listen to him, and that is precisely the problem.
It all begins at an exhibition in Buenos Aires. Among the visitors, a woman stops in front of a tiny detail in one of his paintings: a small window in the corner of the canvas, with a solitary figure gazing out to sea. Nobody else had noticed it. Castel becomes convinced that this stranger is the only person capable of understanding him, and what begins as hope soon hardens into obsession.
The novel's great strength is that everything is told from inside that head. Castel is not a raving madman but someone who reasons relentlessly. He analyses every sentence María speaks, every silence and every delay, and builds ever more elaborate and ever more absurd theories on top of them. The logic is flawless; the premises are deranged. The effect is unsettling, because for many pages it is hard to pinpoint exactly where the reasoning goes wrong.
Published in 1948, the novel breathes the air of existentialism, the philosophical movement that placed the loneliness of the individual and the absurdity of existence at the centre of everything. Its closest relative is The Outsider by Albert Camus, another short novel narrated by a killer who talks about his crime with disconcerting coldness. Fittingly, Camus himself admired The Tunnel and championed its publication in France. But where Camus's narrator is indifferent to everything, Castel is the exact opposite: he cares far too much.
Read today, the novel feels uncomfortably current. Castel's jealousy, his need to know where María is at every moment and his conviction that she belongs to him match what would now be recognised without hesitation as coercive control. The series You, in which a stalker calmly and politely narrates his fixation on a woman, relies on the same device: hand the voice to the perpetrator and let him condemn himself. Sabato did it seventy years earlier, and without any romantic alibi.
Not everything works equally well. Around the midpoint, Castel's reasoning starts to repeat itself, and the tension stalls in a loop of suspicion and reproach. There is also the question of María, who never exists beyond the gaze of the man pursuing her. It is a choice consistent with the novel's form, but it leaves a noticeable gap: the reader learns everything about the obsessed man and almost nothing about the woman he is obsessed with.
Even so, few novels this short leave such a lingering impression. It can be read in an afternoon, almost in one sitting, and by the end its title makes complete sense: the tunnel is the place from which Castel views the world, dark, narrow and with no exit except the one he invents for himself.
About the author
Ernesto Sabato (Rojas, Argentina, 1911 – Santos Lugares, 2011) earned a doctorate in physics and worked at the Curie Laboratory in Paris before abandoning science for literature. He wrote only three novels: The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs and Abaddón el exterminador. In 1984 he received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in Spanish-language literature. That same year, the commission he chaired delivered Nunca más (Never Again), the report documenting the disappearances under Argentina's military dictatorship. The Tunnel has been adapted for the cinema more than once.
To continue the series: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, another novel that reveals the crime from the start and focuses on how it happened, and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, with another protagonist trapped in a loneliness with no way out.