The Tunnel

The first sentence tells you he killed her. The rest of the novel explains why — or tries to, because Juan Pablo Castel is not a reliable guide to his own madness. He is a painter. María is the only person who ever truly saw his work. Their affair is an attempt at communication between two people for whom communication is impossible, set against Buenos Aires's galleries and cafés and the particular loneliness of a man who believes art is the only bridge between souls and then discovers even that bridge does not hold. Sabato's short, relentless novel reads like a confession written on a prison wall. It is existentialism as crime fiction — Camus with a knife.