However, Sábato said he was soon troubled by the news of persecution coming from Russia. Sábato's response, in 1933, was to become the secretary of the Communist Youth Federation in Argentina. The first of many military interventions in 20th-century Argentina took place in 1930. They lived in tin shacks, surrounded by huge puddles of stinking water.' La Plata was also a centre for the meat-exporting industry, and Sábato's desire for social change was fuelled by the workers' conditions: 'These were the largest meat-packing plants in Argentina, where all kinds of immigrants were mercilessly exploited. Sábato first came into contact with this radicalism when he began to study science at the university town of La Plata, near the capital. Among the new ideas the thousands of European immigrants brought to Argentina was an enthusiasm for the communist revolution in Russia. As a youth, he became involved in the effervescent intellectual atmosphere of the Argentinian capital as it grew vertiginously and entered the modern world. Sábato was born into a well-to-do family in Rojas, Buenos Aires province. He likened all of us to blind people stumbling in the darkness. In these books, Sábato explored the themes of isolation and the lack of communication between individuals who are caught up in a succession of events they can do nothing to control, and are hard put to understand. His first novel, El Túnel (The Tunnel, 1947), won him a respectful following, but it was his two later novels, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs, 1961) and Abaddón el Exterminador (The Angel of Darkness), that earned him his reputation. Ernesto Sábato, who has died aged 99, was the last of a generation of Argentinian writers whose moral rectitude in the midst of political chaos gave them an importance far beyond whatever audience their fictional books attracted.

El túnel by ernesto sabato