Prize-winning writer Sabato buried, lauded in Argentina

Prize-winning novelist and man of letters Ernesto Sabato, one of Argentina’s most revered 20th century writers, was laid to rest on Sunday amid high praise for a man many simply called The Master.

The country’s Presidential campaign ground to a halt and normally-inflamed football passions were muted for the funeral in the town of Pilar outside Buenos Aires for Mr Sabato, who died on Saturday at the age of 99.

The writer’s best known work, The Tunnel, was a first novel published in 1948 that deals with the existential search for self and identity.

Other novels, including On Heroes and Tombs (1962) and The Angel of Darkness (1974), also became part of the cannon of Latin American literature.

But he also earned tremendous respect for leading a ground-breaking probe into abuses under the country’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, and for his essays examining the tensions between technology and humanism.

His youngest son Mario, a filmmaker, quoted Mr Sabato as saying he wanted his wake to be held in the club “so that the people of the barrio can accompany me on my final voyage, and I want them to remember me as a neighbour, a curmudgeon at times but basically a good guy.”

Shortly after his death, dozens of neighbours came to the modest house where the writer lived and left flowers on the garden gate. The office of President Cristina Kirchner sent a wreath, and several other dignitaries paid respects.

Mr Sabato was a physicist who trained at top institutes in France and the United States but turned away from science to become a writer and political iconoclast bucking the country’s authoritarian regimes.