Sabato comes with a ready-made critical reputation as "the new Borges", although he's actually a very different sort of writer. The constant playfulness and elaboration of fantasies characteristic of the Borges-Márquez school are to a lesser degree also present [in On Heroes and Tombs], but at the core of this novel is an atmosphere of psychological realism and obsessional thinking, thinking that often approaches Dostoyevskian heights. This isn't, in other words, the latest intellectual romp through an exotic Latin American landscape, but it is a very powerful and accomplished book that will take awhile to find its proper audience.

Paul Stuewe, "Non-Fiction: 'On Heroes and Tombs'" (reprinted by permission of the author), in Quill and Quire, Vol. 47, No. 11, November, 1981, p. 29.