Homage to Allen Josephs as a Reviewer

Back in 1991 when I wrote microfiction, I dearly loved to read book reviews, especially in the New York Times.  I thought: "If I could only write quality book reviews.  Wow!  I would give anything to have the talent to write reviews like that.  There was one review I read over and over since I thought the book a modern classic and the review so incredibly insightful: The Angel of Darkness by Ernesto Sabato - Review by Allen Josephs. Curiously enough, when I wrote my own review of a Sabato novel, I sent a copy to Allen Josephs, thanking him for his quality reviews and letting him know I use his reviews as a model for my own.  Allen Josephs wrote back: "No need to model your reviews on mine, Glenn.  You are doing a fine job on your own."  Of course, music to my ears. 

THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS

By Ernesto Sabato  ------- Review by Allen Josephs

IN "The Angel of Darkness," by the celebrated Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato, the main character, also called Ernesto Sabato, never wakes up as a gigantic insect like Kafka's Gregor Samsa. But he does turn into a four-foot bat.

Revealing this transmogrification will not spoil the story, since from the first page the reader witnesses a strangely unseeing Sabato negotiating on foot a dangerous downtown intersection in Buenos Aires. The opening pages are, at least chronologically, near the close of "The Angel of Darkness," a cryptically political, deliberately paranoiac novel that begins at the end and then replays itself until it arrives full circle, back at the starting and finishing point.  Published in Buenos Aires in 1974 but only now translated into English -- by Andrew Hurley, so imaginatively that his new version often reads better than the original -- this prize-winning novel (France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and Spain's Miguel de Cervantes Prize, among others) must be read more than once to understand its intricacies, such as Sabato's batlike sonar in that opening passage. (We don't actually find out he's a bat until 400 pages later.) Even after multiple readings, many things remain obscure, purposely unexplained so that the controlling consciousness of the book can re-create its circular nightmare in the reader.

It's no surprise that the fictional Sabato's biography, which serves as a skeletal plot, parallels Mr. Sabato's own life and career. In piecemeal fashion we reconstruct Sabato's friendships and animosities; his countless fears and phobias; his abandonment of physics for literature in the Paris of the late 1930's; the publication to acclaim of his first novel, "The Tunnel," in 1948; the publication of his second novel, "On Heroes and Tombs," in 1961; his growing status as an intellectual celebrity, as an essayist and curmudgeon, as the subject of doctoral dissertations and so forth.

Obviously, however, unless we're willing to accept that the novel has been written by a bat, somewhere along the line Sabato must undergo some sort of transformation. How and why this happens and what it means is the grisly central mystery of the book. Suffice it to say that this involves a perverse and diabolical ritual union that hinges upon gruesome psychosexual details.

What can be described are three of the novel's opening "events," which take place in the early hours of the Feast of the Epiphany, on the night of Jan. 5-6, 1973. In the first, a drunk called Loco walks out of a bar and has an epiphany of his own: he and only he sees a "dragon covering the midnight firmament -- a furious serpent flowing hot and blood-red against the abyss of India ink." The novel's title and its epigraph from Revelation ("And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name is Abaddon"), as well as this apocalyptic monster "spewing fire from the mouths of its seven heads," set the novel's graphically Gothic tone. Clearly there is something desperately wrong in Argentina, but the revelation of this beast slithering toward Buenos Aires is only for Loco.

In the second event, a young man named Nacho watches as his sister goes into a businessman's apartment at 2 o'clock in the morning. For Nacho, it is the end of the world. As we learn later, he and his sister had been lovers.

The third event occurs "in the sordid basement of a police station just outside the city," where another young man, Marcelo, after days of torture for supposedly belonging to a guerrilla group, is "dumped into a sack and beaten" until he dies.

Does everything that follows -- really everything that precedes -- somehow relate to these seemingly unconnected events? The publisher's blurb misleadingly warns us of "a subterranean network of evil that steals through the city like a secret plague," but the only verifiable connection is the character of Sabato himself. Is he the angel of darkness, the king of the abyss?

There are no doubt networks of evil in Buenos Aires, but this novel is about a personal vision of evil. And there is nothing new in this distinction. Mr. Sabato's earliest novel, "The Tunnel," is narrated in the first person from an insane asylum by a murderer. His second, "On Heroes and Tombs," contains a long section called "the manuscript of a paranoiac," and Mr. Sabato has confessed that he can only write to free himself of an obsession. Furthermore, the solipsistic main character in "The Angel of Darkness" wrote both those novels and this one, creating an anomalous Chinese-box effect that lends this mysterious narrator an air of simultaneous self-indulgence and nonpareil honesty.

"The Angel of Darkness" has a huge cast of eccentric characters from every walk of Argentine life, including many from Mr. Sabato's second novel -- even the ghost of its deceased main character. All the ghastly obsessions from that novel are here too: slime, filth, lizards, snakes, rats, cockroaches, weasels and, above all, the obsessive, morbid, hideously rendered Sect of the Blind, which had obsessed Fernando, the paranoid character in the previous novel, and which now obsesses and "persecutes" his "creator."

The political parts of the novel are the least convincingly rendered -- 1973 was the year of the return of Peronism and Col. Juan Domingo Peron to Argentina, events never mentioned but perhaps apocalyptically foreshadowed for Loco's eyes only. The narrative's many digressions on different types of Marxism and "the Revolution" seem tedious to a reader in the 1990's.

Yet the peculiar mixture of these elements with witchcraft, horror, torture and the increasing paranoia of the character named Sabato give the novel a bizarre split personality, turning it into a source of deliberate disinformation: the more we read, the less we know. If this destabilizing experience is intended to engage the hapless reader in an infernal textual version of a witches' Sabbath, a phantasmagoria that also seems to be Mr. Sabato's only possible response to what was by 1974 the ever-darkening tunnel of Argentine reality, it succeeds very well.

In the novel's final section, Sabato's friend Bruno discovers the tombstone of Ernesto Sabato. Bruno is shocked, but the reader is not. By now we have come to expect anything in this radical novel of exorcism and, above all, to understand that its overwhelming, sometimes fascinating, always morbid and abysmally brilliant message is about solitude, suffering and loss. Not everyone will want to wrestle with this intransigent angel of a book, but the undaunted will encounter a truly hellish match.