On Heroes and Tombs

Description

Sabato's masterpiece of obsessive love and murder in 1950s Buenos Aires, new to Penguin Modern Classics Sabato's dark, philosophical novel is woven around a violent crime committed by Alejandra, the daughter of a prominent Argentinian family. Alejandra's act entwines the lives of three men- her father, Fernanda Vidal, a man who believes himself hunted by a secret organization of the blind, her troubled lover, Martin and Bruno, a writer who loved her mother. Exploring the tumult of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, On Heroes and Tombs leads its reader into a world of passion, philosophy and paranoia.

Ernesto Sabato (Author) Ernesto Sabato was born in Argentina in 1911. He earned a PhD in physics before relocating to Paris. After World War II, he lost faith in science and began writing fiction, although he would burn much of his work. His three published novels are The Tunnel (1948), his masterpiece On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and The Angel of Darkness (1974). He also led the commission investigating those who disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970s. Sabato died in 2011, two months before his 100th birthday. Helen Lane (Translator) Helen Lane was a renowned translator of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian literary texts into English. She was twice awarded the PEN Translation Prize.

A book with some claim to be the first major set-piece in that carnival of fictional fireworks which mesmerized Latin America throughout the next decade. It offers a rich motherlode of imagery, language and haunting scenes -- Salman Rushdie Bewitched, baroque, monumental * Newsweek * A novelist of immense power ... uncompromising and original -- Colm Toibin * Guardian *