The 125 captioned chapters of Abaddón offer the reader an unconvincing pastiche made up of the "flesh, blood, tears and thoughts" emanating from [Sabato's] previous writings. Thus we find Sábato playing himself, surrounded by a host of characters from his two previous novels …; monologues on the function of literature, on the writer and his public and on literary genres and currents (anti-Robbe-Grillet but pro-Kafka) which are barely paraphrased statements taken from earlier works such as El escritor y sus fantasmas or Hombres y engranajes; and reminiscences of his early "scientific" years in Paris. Stylistically and thematically, Sábato appears as his own spokesman, at times under the guise of Quique delivering known diatribes against a rational universe and its crassest manifestations—the culture of the United States for instance—at times exploring the "humble" Buenos Aires in waterfront cafés or the Olmos cemetery as Bruno. Powerless...