Sábato is a former physicist and one of Argentina's foremost intellectuals who has been preoccupied with the complexities of the "human condition" in many essays and articles. After incorporating this "condition" in El túnel, this work was labelled by the critics as a psychological detective story, a tale of crime and passion, an expressionistic document, a reflection of French existentialism and, above all, a testimony of man's inability to reach a spiritual understanding with the human beings around him.

El túnel deserves all of these attributes because the author was skillful enough to create a structure that allowed him to build in these themes. The plot centers around the tragic existence of the painter Juan Pablo Castel, a man who had lost faith in humanity after he had stopped believing in himself…. Only after meeting María Iribarne, the one person who seemed to grasp...