Santa Evita

by Tomás Eloy Martínez

Book Overview

Una novela fascinante que profundiza en la enigm tica vida y vida despu s de la muerte de una de las figuras m s ic nicas de Argentina. En este apasionante relato, Mart nez te lleva en un viaje a trav... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679768149
• ISBN13: 9780679768142
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A great historical novel

T. Eloy Martínez offers a truly special portrayal of Argentina's first lady, Eva Perón. The story of her wandering cadaver is haunting, tragic and at times quite hilarious, and always mind-blowing. I recommend this novel. (I'm not sure the English translation is decent, so if you can, read it in Spanish). It's a great example of the poststructuralist novel of the 20th century.

Santa Evita.

Really a fantastic book, in which the novel is mixed with historical facts which not only captivates you in the way as it is written, but also introduces some light to certain facts that took place after Evita's death, specifically, the outregious destination given to Evita's body which were never publicly revealed. For me, an Argentine citizien born in Buenos Aires some years (not many) after Evita's death, who in some way or in the other has been always captivated by Evita's personality, although did not share some of her political aspirations and procedures, was somehow tired of hearing huge and enormous amount of histories in relation to Evita's body, with this book I was illustrated in some portion of the history of my country which was secret and maintained undisclosed from the public for many years after Evita's death.To those who may consider that some parts of this book appears more a fiction than a historical fact, well, believe it or not, it was a "real" portion of our past history and not "fiction" or "myth".

A literary work of art

Seeing that "the only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again," Tomás Eloy Martínez brilliantly transposes Evita's postmortem journey into an outrageous postmodern fictional montage wherein the author, represented as a fictitious character and narrator in the novel, spins a web of biography, history and myth into a effervescently farcical and sombrely perverse narrative, mellifluously illuminating the woman who "ceased to be what she said and what she did to become what people say she said and what people say she did." The end-result is a gripping tale which sheds new light upon details that biographers and historians commonly leave behind, seeking to unfold "the unexplained blank spaces" of her domain while tracking the political, mythical, historical body of desires which Evita's cadaver, the body of the nation, incorporates. And quite marvellously, in the interim, the textuality of Santa Evita undrapes the roots of the complex set of relations which provide an understanding of the corpus of discursive regularities that extend the representation of Argentina to Evita's embalmed cadaver as the novel bares and reconstructs the miracles, desires, secrets, and mysteries including the fragments and revelations which triggered the narrative flow, as "little by little Evita began to turn into a story that, before it ended, kindled another." Simply put, a literary work of art.

Thought provoking

This is a terrific historical novel, effortlessly weaving through fact and fiction. I had trouble putting it down. It is an interesting commentary on our obsession with celebrities and the question of what is truth, what is myth? Can we ever really know the truth about those we consider "legends?"

The true novel of the journey of the body of Eva Peron

While claiming to be a novel, much of what is written in this macabre book is documentable as fact. The lines between fact and fiction are hazy at best; but this enhances the fascination with the story of a novelist obsessed with Eva Peron as he researches her profound effect on her people, and as he searches out the trail her body took in the 17 years after her death. With accidental murder and possible necrophilia involved, this is not a light tale, but it's engrossing; for poetry fans, there seems to be a deliberate parallel drawn between the cult of Evita and the cult of Sylvia Plath. Truly a fascinating and frightening story