A good story that deals with questions of what is reality. However, if feels like the translation is lacking - too many awkward or stilted passages (perhaps suffered because the author was not alive to consult). Nevertheless, a recommended read. ( )

This fronts like an upmarket version of Ghost starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, and certainly each of us remembers when we lost the love of our life and everything stopped making sense and we went off the rails and never quite made it back. Aside from or alongside the pugatory of the title, this book's metaphor of choice for that wandering unto death is maps--I think of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' song of that title, with its very similar feel; and all in all this book does truly prime you to feel a great heaviness behind your eyes and crumple with longing. Our sundered lovers here are cartographers, the kind of metaphor that works because it's so heavyhanded. But then, in practice, the lost-and-found romance kind of founders and pales and stales, and if that was the point then respect to the author for pulling it off, and if, as I suspect, what it means is tht no matter what kind of map to happiness you think you've got hidden under the bed in your palace bedroom in your grey kingdom, it's not gonna get you where you're going. There are some cool bits where it's not just Emilia wondering how her Simon can come back to her and not have aged a day, but the reader wondering if Emilia knows, if it's just us that aren't in on it. But that metaweirdness fizzles, and Purgatory wins at a crawl. And that's fine and probably real, but not fun to read about.

Yeah, the Purrrrg. The grey kingdom. This book is set in Argentina during the dictatorship, with a full complement of atrocities, and I think that's ultimately the point, and the love thing just a husk. The best moments in this book were when the protagonist Emilia's father, a kind of scenery-chewing Eichmann for the junta, came out and did his thing; the one scene I think I won't forget is his meeting with Orson Welles, who says "Call me Orsten" and drips contempt and makes you want to know if he was that utterly impressive in real life. But Dupuy, the evil dad, gets some moments of his own. But the broken mess he makes of his daughter makes it hard to enjoy the campier reaches of his villainy, and I'm not sure if I got much insight into said mess in the end beyond that dictatorship ruins people and they don't un-ruin. Certainly, the parts where the author showed up to reminisce about where he was in '78 seemed sterile; that's too harsh a word for the book as a whole, maybe, but what about … discouraged. ( )

This is Argentinian journalist and novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez's final novel -- a work exploring memory, being, longing, waiting, and 20th century Argentinan history in a format that is so much more interesting than that sounds. Beautifully written and translated, this is novel is full of meandering truths in the tradition of the best Latin American fiction.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2012/11/purgatory-by-tomas-eloy-martinez-2011.html ] ( )

Purgatory is the first novel of Tomás Eloy Martínez to be translated into English since his death in 2010. He is best know for his acclaimed books The Peron Novel, Santa Evita, and The Tango Singer. It is translated from the Spanish by award winning translator Frank Wynne.

This was my first novel by Eloy Martínez, so I had nothing but his reputation to go on but I am always willing to try new authors from Latin America. This one did not let me down. It’s a hauntingly melancholy novel about a woman whose husband disappeared thirty years ago along with thousands of others during Argentina’s military dictatorship. She spends the intervening time searching for him as she hears rumors that he has been seen in various places. What makes the book so poignant is that her own father is a high ranking official in the dictatorship and is almost certainly complicit in his son-in-law’s fate and certainly in that of many of his compatriots. Eloy Martínez really does a great job of portraying how a people can put their blinders on and ignore that what they are doing really does not (and cannot) justify the end. As the novel jumps back and forth between the past and the present, you see the toll that this takes on the family and the country.

When Emilia finally sees her husband Símon in a restaurant, he has not aged a bit from the day he disappeared while she, of course, is 30 years older. As the novel winds on, Emilia withdraws into her “life” with Símon. Is it reality or is it all in her mind? You decide…but you should read this book.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage from the book:

“I thought about all the things that disappear without our even noticing, because we know only what exists, we know nothing of those things that never come into existence; I thought about the non-being I would have been had my parents conceived me seconds earlier or later. I thought of the libraries of books never written (Borges tried to make up for this absence in ‘The Library of Babel’), but all that remained was the idea, there was no flesh, no bones, a magnificent lifeless idea. I thought about the Mozart symphonies silenced by his untimely death, about the song running through John Lennon’s mind that December night when he was murdered. If we could recover the unwritten books, the lost music, if we could set out in search of what never existed and find it, then we should have conquered death.”

This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviews (sorry it wasn't really "early") ( )

Purgatory
By Tomas Eloy Martinez
Translation by Frank Wynne
Bloomsbury USA, 273 pgs
978-1-60819-711-8
Rating: 3

Everyone in this novel is loco, at least one taco short of a combo plate. Personally, I have a soft spot for Latino cultures, our neighbors to the south, and Mexico is breaking my heart. I would rather vacation in Peru than in Germany so please don't think I'm prejudiced. Still and all, everyone in this book is insane: the general, the doctor, the mapmaker, the mother, the wife and etc.

Emilia Dupuy's husband Simon Cardoso disappeared in Argentina and has been missing and presumed (or known, depending on who you're talking to) dead for 30 years when she spies him in a restaurant in New Jersey. He has not aged or changed in 30 years, exactly the same. They go back to her place and spend the weekend together. Or maybe they spend the rest of their lives together. Or maybe they don't go back to her place. Maybe Simon is a ghost, or maybe he doesn't exist in any form on any plane.

During the seventies and eighties Argentina suffered from a military dictatorship that had lots in common with the Third Reich and Franco's Spain. Thousands of people were "disappeared." Emilia's father was the chief propagandist for the the general and his regime. In the book the dictator general is referred to as "the Eel" and the appellation is pitch perfect. Simon mouths off one night during dinner and this appears to be the catalyst for everything that comes after.

Emilia and Simon are cartographers and are sent to a remote region to map and are captured by the army, suspected of being subversives. They are separated and interrogated. Emilia is released. What happens after that is murky to say the least. Is Simon released? tortured? executed? There are witnesses who say they witnessed Simon's death or saw his body. Emilia gets anonymous messages claiming he is alive and living in Caracas or Mexico. She spends the rest of her life, as far as we can tell (for not much is actually known), searching for him.

I have had a difficult time deciding what the rating for this book should be. I very much enjoyed the parts in Argentina and the intermittently comedic treatment of the totalitarian regime. I found Emilia's search tedious at times. Mostly this book made me feel impatient. You don't know whether you're coming or going, which way is up? I realize that this is probably what the author intended but geez. It reminded me of the "the big lie" philosophy of the Nazis. Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?

The author of Purgatory was born in Argentina and was forced to live in exile during the military dictatorship. He has written other internationally acclaimed novels such as The Peron Novel and Santa Evita. Senor Martinez was professor of Latin American studies at Rutgers University until his death in 2010. A quote from page 221 about what is lost with death: "If we could recover the unwritten books, the lost music, if we could set out in search of what never existed and find it, then we should have conquered death."

http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/ ( )

For years, you’ve lived in exile, moving from place to place, Emilia; you think you know what it is, but you couldn’t begin to explain it, there are no stories, no words in this desolate terrain because everything within you remained outside the moment you crossed the threshold. You might say that at that moment you entered purgatory, if what came before was hell, if after was paradise, which never came. And when the wandering is over, when you go back to the home you left behind, you think you’re closing the circle, but visiting the museum you realize that the whole journey has been a one-way trip, always leaving. No one returns from exile. What you forsake, forsakes you.

Emilia Dupuy is a cartographer from Argentina, working for a small map company in New Jersey. She has devoted much of her life to the hope that she may one day see her husband Simon again, who disappeared in Argentina during the Dirty War. Purgatory tells the story of Emilia’s loneliness and of her search for her husband, but also the story of the personal impact of tens of thousands of political disappearances in Argentina during the 1970’s and early 80’s.

This was one of the best books I’ve read in the last year. Despite the important historical and political context which sets the backdrop (and a good bit of the foreground) for this novel, what stood out the most to me was the absolutely breathtaking writing. I read all but about 50 pages of this book in one sitting, because I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the page. I was literally entranced, it was like I was dreaming. The narrative is fluid and easy, and I just got lost in Emilia’s world. Martinez writes about atrocity and horror and pain, but somehow never lets the reader lose sight of the beauty of his characters or of the tangible reality of the world that he describes. It is so hard to explain what he creates, the best I can do is to describe his magical realist style as very similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, only better (if that’s possible).

I very much look forward to discovering more of Martinez’s works now that I’ve been introduced to him. I also have to give a hat tip to the translator, Frank Wynne, who managed to retain the elegance and simplicity of Martinez’s words, which I imagine is a very difficult task. Go out and read this book – it is 100% worth it. ( )

At times reminiscent of the great magical realist novels so endemic to South America, Tomas Eloy Martinez's last novel, Purgatory, transcends the style with brilliant technical flourishes, offering a metafiction on personal and national identity. When an Orwellian nightmare state is imposed upon a people, escape, both physical and psychological, becomes paramount. Such is the Argentina of the 1976-1982 military dictatorship, the period when approximately 30,000 "undesirables" simply disappeared.

Emilia is a 60 year old Argentine immigrant cartographer living and working in New Jersey. She last saw her husband Simon 30 years previously, when they were on a journey to map an obscure road in a desolate area of the country. Stopped by military checkpoints, they are arrested and Simon is never seen again. Emilia, being the daughter of the regime's chief propagandist, is wisked back home to safety by her parents. Moving back and forth in time and place, Emilia never fully accepts Simon's disappearence or possible death at the hands of the military government for which her father works and of which he extols the virtues. Then he shows up in New Jersey, not having aged a day in the 30 years he's been missing.

Emilia's story is revealed through interviews with the unnamed narrator, clearly a fictional representation of the author himself. Martinez was also affected by the dictatorship, escaping to exile in New Jersey. As he gets closer to the heart of Emilia's story, he begins to question his own identity and place in the world. Where Emilia has her maps in which she can escape and possibly find Simon, the narrator attempts to remain grounded in reality. But when reality includes the disappearance of such swaths of a populace, is that reality enough?

Technically challenging in its shifting voice, setting and timeframe, Purgatory rewards readers who surrender to its lyrical pull, interspersing moments of suppressed eroticism sprung open with the sheer terror of personal and political patriarchy run amok. Argentina will never be the same, nor will the reader who journeys there with Emilia. ( )

A beautifully written novel focusing on the personal, cultural, psychological, social (etc.) destruction of Argentina's brutal dictatorship of the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Purgatory is a reference to the state of suspended animation that everyone who lost anyone during the period suffered, and it also descended upon the families of the men in charge as well as the obvious victims. The symbolism and metaphors were rampant- for instance the main character Emilia who wanders through her life looking for her disappeared husband is a cartographer, unable to find her way regardless of how much she knows about geography. Well-written and tight, with a great deal of detail and information about the years of the dictatorship. Highly recommended. ( )

"Simon Cardosa had been dead thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, spotted him at lunchtime in the lounge bar in Trudy Tuesday."

That's the opening line and one reason to pick this up. Another reason to pick this up is that it's good. If that doesn't clinch it, then maybe the strong (read: not melodramatic) love story will. Or maybe the insightful commentary on a harsh, unforgiving Argentinian regime will. Add in the ghost spouse and you've got Ghost, minus the melodrama & plus the politics. Read: Purgatory is better than Ghost. ( )

Tomas Eloy Martinez's last novel, Purgatory, is a wildly evocative, dreamlike novel. The story of Emilia Dupuy, an Argentinian exile living in New Jersey, working as a cartographer for Hammond, is told in narrative viewpoints shifting from 3rd person omniscient to the voice of a 1st person observer -- the narrative "author," also an Argentinian exile. The book opens when Emilia sees her husband Simon, one of the "disappeared," missing for 30 years, in a local restaurant having an animated conversation with two Scandinavians. Finally she propels herself to his booth and asks, "Querido, querido mio, where have you been?" He smiles and replies, "We need to talk, don't we? Let's get out of here." And they leave the restaurant together, or do they?

In an interview with Guardian reviewer, Alberto Manguel, Martinez had said that he was trying to write a novel about the 1976-82 Argentinian dictatorship, but without descriptions of atrocities and torture -- rather an evocation of the stifling atmosphere of the time -- what it was like "to breathe in the contaminated air." Emilia lives in that purgatory, not only during the dictatorship, but for the next 30 years as she searches for her husband, not truly knowing whether he is alive or dead, what is true or false, what is real or unreal.

'But at least I could make sure that Simon could see me, draw him to me, position myself with the same orbit. Maps,' she said. 'If I can put myself on the same map as him, sooner or later we're bound to meet. When I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but to me it seems self-evident. If time is the fourth dimension, who knows how many things exist that we cannot see in space-time, how many invisible realities. Maps are almost infinite, and at the same time, they're unfinished.... In order to see Simon, I needed to drop -- or rise above -- a map, if possible every map.' ( )

Purgatory a Novel, by Tomas Eloy Martinez

While Jorge Luis Borges will always be considered the godhead of Argentine literature it is to Tomas Eloy Martinez that accolades should be showered for documenting the arc of mid-twentieth century Argentine history. Borges métier was short fiction, erudite and mystical, steeped in the earlier 1900’s documenting the push and pull of gaucho life with the European influence of Buenos Aires. Borges’ strong points were essays about books and his unique metaphysical visions despite (or perhaps heightened by) his own visual impairment. In his later novel, The Tango Singer, Tomas Eloy Martinez pays special homage to Borges; in this tale the main character is a graduate student searching for the exact location of Borges’ El Aleph.

Both Borges and Martinez died before they could be bestowed the awards they justly deserved: for Borges the Nobel Prize for Literature, for Martinez the International Man Booker Prize for which he was nominated in 2005.

With Purgatory a Novel, Martinez demonstrates clearly that via the novel he is the master illuminating recent Argentine history. Starting with The Peron Novel which portrays how the quite ordinary and obsequious Colonel transforms his position into a pervasive politics, and then with Santa Evita his choice of spouse catapulted both of them into the realm of religious adoration capturing the imagination and dedication of the common folk. Now with Purgatory a Novel Tomas Eloy Martinez takes on the dictatorship of the late 1970’s who brought a reign of terror to this country that still permeates its soul and fires up the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo frequent protests.

Purgatory is the story of Emilia, daughter of Dr. Dupuy, the chief propagandist of the dictatorship. In the wake of the dictatorship which is determined to squelch all dissidents through disappearances, she marries a fellow cartographer she has met at the Argentine Automobile Association. At a small dinner party hosted by her father and attended by the President (often referred to as the eel) to celebrate the betrothal to her soon to be husband, Simon, Emilia’s fiancé begs to differ with the current policies, questioning the morality of torture.

Shortly thereafter while on assignment to chart unknown backloads of the pampas, Emilia and Simon are detained by a ragged detail of soldiers who determine that Simon should be held for further interrogation. He is never seen again and Emilia sets forth on decades of longing and searching from Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and finally ending up in New Jersey where she meets a fellow Argentine-a mildly disguised version of Tomas Eloy Martinez himself: a college professor of literature at a New Jersey University. It is through this meeting of the 2 exiles that her story is told through both flashbacks and real time.

The absurd cruelty of the regime is aptly depicted in a brief interview The Eel has with a Japanese journalist stating that “ ‘firstly we would have to verify that what you say existed was where you say it was. Reality can be very treacherous. Lots of people are desperate for attention and they disappear just so people won’t forget them…A desaparecido is a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a ‘disappeared’. And as he said he does not exist, he rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Don’t use that word again,’ he went on, ‘you have no basis for it. It is forbidden to publish it. Let it be disappeared and be forgotten.’ ”

Of course that is what any regime of terror hopes for; that the powers will control the message and dictate what is considered to be the truth, what is real and what is to be acknowledged and remembered. But this dirty war ultimately failed, on the shores of the Malvinas it took its last gasp and it was the Mothers of the Plaza Major and the other victims - like Emilia and Tomas Eloy Martinez- that would not allow the disappeared to be forgotten. As in a prior novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander, the absurd terror that permeated Argentina in the late 70’s is exposed for all to remember. Like Martinez, Englander describes and captures the bureaucratic maze of obstacles, an artifice constructed by the late dictatorship of Jorge Videla (the eel in Purgatory) to obstruct from the view of its citizenry the true evil of his evil regime, manifested by the abduction of the infants of dissidents who are then adopted by childless Colonels and Captains of the Army’s elite corp.

Like the unchartered roads Emilia and Simon set out to find in Patagonia, the search for our lost loves, Eloy Martinez writes, is also uncharted. Once gone they only exist in memories and imaginations. The parallel and reference to “the politics of memory” that existed behind the Iron Curtain as portrayed by Milan Kundera in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and also administered by the perpetrators of Jorge Videla’s Dirty Wars is undeniable. Imagining what was and never was is uniquely described by Eloy Martinez in one powerful passage in which the imagined Simon describes an event that occurred while he was working as an attendant in an old age home:

“The writer with the slate who used to pace the corridors of the old folks’ home also told me a dream. It wasn’t a dream exactly; it was the memory of a recurring dream. A huge black dog was jumping on him and licking him. Inside the dog were all the things that had never existed and even those that no one even imagined could exist. ‘What does not exist is constantly seeking a father’, said the dog, ‘someone to give it consciousness.’ ‘A god?’ asked the writer. ‘No, it is searching for any father,’ answered the dog. ‘The things that do not exist are much more numerous than those that manage to exist. That which will never exist is infinite. The seeds that do not find soil and water and do not become plants, the lives that go unborn, the characters that remain unwritten.’ ‘The rocks that have crumbled to dust?’ ‘No those rocks once were. I am speaking only of what might have been but never was,’ said the dog. ‘The brother that never was because you existed in his place. If you had been conceived seconds before or seconds after, you would not be who you are, you would not know that your existence vanished into nowhere without you even realizing. That which will never be known that it might have been. This is why novels are written: to make amends in this world for the perpetual absence of what never existed.’ The dog vanished into the air and the writer woke up.’ “

Near the end of Pergatory a Novel, the narrator, the Argentine professor states:

“the more I delve into Emilia’s life, the more I realize that from beginning to end it is an unbroken chain of losses, disappearances and senseless searches. She spent years chasing after nothing, after people who no longer existed, remembering things that had never happened. But aren’t we all like that? Don’t we all abuse history to leave some trace there of what we once were, a miserable smudge, a tiny flame when we know that even the darkest mark is a bird that will leave on a breath of wind? One human being is more or less the same as another; perhaps we are all already dead without realizing it, or not yet born and do not know it…we come into the world without knowing it, the result of a series of accidents, and we leave it to go who knows where, nowhere probably.”

We can only hope that prior to his recent death Eloy had time to expand his trilogy of novels (spanning the 1940’s to 1970’s) and that someday soon we will have a quartet; the fourth installment detailing the more recent economic and political crisis of 2001 when the bank doors shut, the vaults were sealed tight, the currency, the peso devalued overnight, forcing hundreds of thousands portenos onto the avenidas of Buenos Aires, banging on their pots and pans for justice and transparency. The Kirchners, Nestor and Cristina, came to power with a neo-Peronism, a nationalistic approach blaming outsiders, the IMF, the World Bank, the Brits and the elites of Buenos Aires. Today the Kirchenrites are still at it, attacking their critics: academics, capitalists and the media; they have become minor shadows of their historic precedents, Juan Peron and all other governments that have tried to “control the message”.

Tomas Elroy Martinez has documented through his novels the mid-twentieth century history of Argentina. From The Peron Novel which starts in the 1930’s to Santa Evita and now Purgatory a Novel which roots itself in the dictatorship of the late 1970’s. Martinez, through story and characterization lets the reader in on what the Argentine peoples have lived through. We can only hope that that there is another book he left in his desk drawer that will explicate for us the economic crisis of the late 90’s and the resurgent Kirchnerites who perpetrate a quasi Peronism and political split between the rural nativist and the more universal European outlook of Buenos Aires. Ironically we find ourselves back at the beginning with the same themes that Borges, himself, mined over and over.

The Argentine drama evolves and it has lost one of its best literary chroniclers. Without Tomas Eloy Martinez, who will portray this most recent chapter? ( )

First let me say thanks to the LT Early Reviewers program for selecting me to read this book. And thanks also to Bloomsbury, whose published works of translated fiction have been absolutely topnotch.

If there is anyone qualified to write about Argentina's Dirty War (1976-83) , it is Martinez. He himself went into exile after a series of reports he did for a newspaper in Buenos Aires led to blacklisting, death threats, and according to an interview in The Guardian from 2007, armed gunmen surrounding the restaurant in which he was eating. In Purgatory, Martinez explores not only the desaparecidos, but also examines the question of those left behind when their families, friends, loved ones and neighbors just vanished. It is a sad but compelling novel, one that you won't forget long after the book is put back on its shelf. Hopefully, it may also inspire you to read other books about this dark time in Argentina's history.

The last time Emilia Cardoso saw her husband Simón was thirty years ago during a map-making assignment in a patch of desert in Argentina. She and Simon were employed as cartographers while on assignment from the Automobile Club, and they were tasked to map a desolate stretch of road outside of Tucuman. Their journey took them as far as Huacra, and it was there where Emilia's life-long purgatory began. After coming upon a group of people hiding from the military police out in the desert, some dying of thirst, they make it their own mission to offer help, and in doing so, Simón and Emilia were taken into custody themselves. Their captors separated the two and then took them away; Emilia was rescued by her father, Dr. Dupuy, who helps the military government as publisher of a magazine for influential people called La Republica. Although she searched and waited, waited and searched, she never found Simón again. He had become one of the thousands of desaparecidos, victims of Argentina's dirty war:

"... a mystery, he has no substance, he is neither alive nor dead, he does not exist. He is a 'disappeared.' "

Oddly enough, Simón has now turned up in a New Jersey diner, where Emilia is living and working, continuing her career in maps. He hasn't aged a bit since Emilia last saw him, while she has gone on with her life, aging normally, although her life has been anything but typical.

The novel continues in alternating narratives, those of Emilia and a writer in exile who befriends her after recovering from a serious illness. He is determined to tell her story, which is related here largely through flashbacks leading back to the very beginning where her story begins, during the time of Argentina's dirty war. It was a time when reality was covered up by government propagandists, when "propaganda manufactured illusions of happiness in the wasteland of misery," and Emilia's father, Dr. Dupuy, helped make this possible, often through a smoke-and-mirrors approach to the truth. Any real truth was considered lies, the weapon of subversives who wanted to tarnish Argentina's national image and crush the national spirit. Even when information is passed on to Emilia that Simon had been killed by the military, her father told her it was the work of subversives trying to get to him and his family. But Emilia never gives up looking for Simon; she takes mapmaking jobs to support herself during her search, moves from place to place where sightings have been reported, and eventually she comes to realize that she can no longer go on this way, ultimately taking a job in New Jersey.

But all of this time Emilia has been living in her own Purgatory, " a wait whose end we cannot know." She has only one remotely close friend, she never remarries, she has trouble fitting in, she never stops hoping, never accepts that Simon might possibly be dead and lives in a constant state of denial. In this sense, Emilia has become a living ghost in a way -- as she notes after her chance meeting with Simon, "Without him, I don't exist." And this is the same fate as many of those thousands of people who had "disappeared with no apparent reason," -- indeed, as the fictional author notes,

"Emilia's not the only person to hope that someone she loves will come back from the dead; there are thousands like her, clinging to an illusion."

And at the heart of this story are all of those thousands of people whose lives are on perpetual hold waiting for some word even now, decades later.

You don't need to have a background in Argentina's history to understand and appreciate this novel; it can't hurt, but Martinez manages to get the critical points of the period across to his readers without going into a lot of historical detail.

I don't suppose this book will be to everyone's taste, but if you are at all familiar with or interested in the desaparecidos or Argentina's Dirty War, you will probably really like this novel. While the blurb says "ghost story," you have to look at that phrase in terms of metaphor rather than hoping that there's something paranormal to come out of this book, so if that's what caught your eye, well, you're reading the wrong story. Purgatory is a wonderful, moving story of a woman who has been through a great deal of loss; it is also the story of the spirit of love that never dies, while at the same time , since it cannot really speak to what actually happened to the thousands of disappeared, it is the story of the ones left behind. And clever Martinez also manages to put his readers in a state of uncertainty as they wonder about Simón's return and as they wait to discover what will ultimately become of Emilia. It is a lovely book and I definitely recommend it. ( )

I have often wondered what it is about living in South America that leads writers to adopt the form of magical realism. Having read PURGATORY by Tomas Eloy Martinez, recently translated into English by Frank Wynne and published by Bloomsbury USA, I think that I understand. Since the 1930s, Argentina experienced more than 30 political coup d'etats. In 1975, a military junta seized power from Juan Peron. From 1976 until 1983, in government-instigated acts of terrorism, an estimated 15,000 persons were "disappeared" - some say the number could be double that. Martinez's inventive and tender elegy commemorates the loss of the widow of one such victim.

Please read the rest of my review at Bookeywookey.com:

http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2012/03/navigating-time-across-abyss-of-loss.ht...

A smart captivating read by Argentinian author Tomás Eloy Martínez who lived in exile during the dictatorship that almost destroyed his country. Purgatory is the story of Emilia Dupuy, whose husband is one of the "disappeared" and whose father, as a high-ranking military official, orchestrated that disappearance. Despite eye-witness accounts of her husband's torture and murder, Emilia refuses to believe and spends her life searching for him. The story flows seamlessly between realism and fantasy, love story and ghost story. Highly recommended. ( )

Upon reading the back cover, I expected a novel of magical realism about a sixty-year-old woman, and her long-missing husband, who hadn't aged a day since he disappeared. What I got was something else entirely. Purgatory is a lyrical novel, at the center of which are Argentina's "disappeared." While I've come away with the sense that this is an important novel (or, at least, an important subject to be immortalized), I did not find it to be an engaging one. For me, it felt like a fairly disjointed bait-and-switch, roping me in with the promise of magical realism, only to have that aspect of the novel evaporate as the narrative delves into the world of the regime's propagandist, and then as it incorporates the author as a character in his own work. I really wanted to love this book, unfortunately, it just didn't work for me. ( )

Perhaps the only sane approach to the insanity and cruelty of Argentina's Dirty War is to fade into a magical-realistic vision. Tomás Eloy Martínez does just that in Purgatory. In the story of a woman who searches for thirty years for her husband who was disappeared, he invites the reader to share the fear, despair, and helplessness of the survivor. I know nothing about the Dirty War other than what I have read in this book. Even with my faulty understanding of what Eloy Martínez was doing, I think that I know enough.
Purgatory wanders through time with both a third person narration that seemed clumsily translated and a first person narration that is immediate and deft. Emilia, the main character, is sixty when she sees her husband, still looking the thirty years that he was when he disappeared, in a restaurant in New Jersey, far from their Argentinian homeland. The couple had been cartographers sent on assignment into the wilds to make a valid map for their company. They stumble onto a crowd of homeless people, rounded up by the milita and dumped in the wilderness (in one of the most distressing scenes in the book) with no means of sustenance. When they try to report them, they are arrested. Because Emilia's father is a central power behind the government, she is saved. Simón, however, disappears. Emilia spends her life looking for him and drawing maps by which they may find their way to one another.
Maps and disappearances are the controlling motifs of the book. For Emilia a map has a separate reality which one may enter. In some sense everybody in the book disappears. Emilia and her professor friend, the first person narrator who is or is not TEM, have disappeared in exile. Emilia's mother disappears in dementia. Her cruel, callous father finally disappears in death. The Argentina that Emilia and her friends love disappears in illusion. This being present and not present is the essence of Purgatory.
Hear a conversation between Emilia and Simón:
"'I've been looking for this island for a long time,' he says. 'I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that's my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.'
'It must be situated in time, then,' Emilia says, 'and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.'"
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It will bear rereading, especially for somebody like me who understood only a small portion of what she read. ( )

An impressive literary novel about the Disappeared of Argentina -- centrally about one woman whose husband vanishes into the clutches of the security forces. But the book is not for the most part literal or didactic in its exploration of this, and the list of what besides this husband disappears into purgatory despite the characters' attempts to freeze into existence by mapping -- fixing in place -- is impressive: a mother's consciousness, the places of a town, history, even the life of the author and his protagonist all slip or start to slip away. In fact, the slowest / weakest parts of the novel, to me, are the parts most straightforwardly descriptive of the life of the protagonist in Argentina -- well told, but a little familiar.

The telling of the opening conceit -- the protagonist, after searching for years for her husband despite the facts, obvious to most, that he must be dead, sees him across a restaurant in New Jersey -- is wonderful, and the way the husband, and then the widow, and even the city become simultaneously there and not there, simultaneous describes the dilemna of Argentina in the wake of the Dirty War and echoes in the broader human condition.

An exploration of the legacy of Argentina's Dirty War, this is a tremendous book.

It opens with an incredible first sentence and it contains a brilliant set piece involving Orsen Welles, but it does slow down from time to time. It is well worth pushing through, because this is a special work. For me, the difficulty was with the main character, Emilia, who is confusing and hard to understand. She frequently seems passive or obtuse despite her obvious intelligence and drive. But as the novel unfolds, the source of her character becomes clear. She is revealed in the end as the victim not just of her husband's disappearance but also of her powerful father's domination and control. She is an obvious stand-in for Argentina itself, deceived and brutalized, and part of the book's brilliance is that by the end the cause of her suffering and mental unravelling is so understandable.

It is a novel about dreams and illusions, good and bad. The disappearances and loss that lie at the center of the novel are not just the loss of things that existed, but also the absence of the things that never were. Dreams, maps, boundaries and writing are all metaphors for ways we both lose our way and try to find ourselves.

In our rather feckless time, where first novels about college baseball players are elevated to "best of the year" status, this book stands out. It is difficult, serious and important. The author died before this was translated into English, but it proudly speaks for him. I hope people read this book. ( )

An Early Reviewer book
“Purgatory,” a novel by Tomas Eloy Martinez, is a puzzling book to read.

Translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne it does have notes (pp. 271-273) but they come as a belated aid as there are none of the usual footnote references in the text.

Here is the book’s opening sentence:
“Simon Cardoso had been dead thirty years when his wife, Emelia Dupuy, spotted him at lunchtime in the lounge bar in Trudy Tuesday.”
Thirty years dead? Simon had been “disappeared” in Argentina, presumed dead. Trudy Tuesday is a restaurant in New Jersey. Somewhat more than 5,000 miles separate these places.

On page 149 we read “novels are written to make amends in this world for the perpetual absence of what never existed.”

I have four pages of notes I wrote as I was reading this book. I paused in my work and found the excellent review written by KelliSFlor. Perhaps I will amend my review later but let it stand now. I refer potential readers to hers. ( )

Guess what came in the mail today! No note from the publisher and it arrived quite a bit later than I've come to expect from books in the ER program, but the book is in great condition and not a galley or ARC. I read the first sentence as soon as I opened the package and am already intrigued! I'll update this review later once I've had a chance to sit down and read it. :-)

“And when the wandering is over, when you go back to the home you left behind, you think you’re closing the circle, but visiting the museum you realise that the whole journey has been a one-way trip, always leaving. No one returns from exile (217).”

Emilia Dupuy lives in exile in New Jersey, away from her native Argentina. She’s been a cartographer all of her adult life, and understands the metaphorical and changeable nature of maps. The daughter of a wealthy and influential man, she has spent years searching for her husband, who was disappeared shortly after they were married; her father was probably behind the disappearance. In 1970s Argentina, thousands of people were disappeared at the hands of the government, and Eloy Martínez has penned a book that explores the human side of a desaparecido without becoming overtly political – it bears noting that Eloy Martínez himself was Argentinean, and living in exile in New Jersey. The book alternates between Emilia’s voice and that of an exiled Argentinean professor, who easily could have been the author.

Emilia refuses to believe her husband is dead, despite witnesses who saw his battered body with a gunshot wound between the eyes. She lives in search of him, until one day she realizes she needs to stay in one place so he can find her. The title of the book is Purgatory, and it is fitting at many levels. Emilia lives in a type of Purgatory, an interstitial place that seems to have no resolution: she is married but has no husband; she lives in exile, in that common state of immigrants who no longer really fit anywhere. She draws her maps to try to find Simón, her husband, on them, but she knows maps can lie very easily. The back cover of the book describes as, in part, a ghost story – and ghosts also inhabit an intermediate state of purgatory. As an additional insult, many no longer believe in purgatory, so the belief itself is disappearing. A game of mirrors, of people and objects on maps that vanish, of unfulfilled love, and of hope in a novel that borders on magical realism without ever quite entering the genre.

And then, one day, Emilia sees her husband in a bar in New Jersey, but this is not the Simón who would be 60 years old, but the 33 year-old who disappeared.

This is a compelling book with multiple levels of meaning. It can be read with no knowledge of Argentina’s Dirty War and enjoyed, but knowing even a little 1970s Argentina history will help reveal many of the nuances. Eloy Martínez writing is gifted at revealing the complexities of human emotion; this is perhaps most obvious when the voice switches from Emilia’s emotional tone to the professor’s much more analytical one. Although they are both lonely exiled people, they approach life very differently. This is not a book to rush through, but one to savor.

If I had to find a problem with the book, it would be the translation. Frank Wynne Is a very well-known and excellent translator, and he captures the essence of the book marvelously. The problem was that I could feel the Spanish trying to shine through, and it made me not want to read the book in English. My advice would be that if you are a Spanish speaker, get the untranslated version. If not, enjoy Purgatory knowing that the translation somehow was able to keep the Spanish tone throughout the novel.

Late addition: I have to agree with Esta1923 above. If you are not a Spanish-speaker, the list of terms should be earlier where they are visible, and not at the end. Once you find them, you are done reading. This is a problem. ( )