Bien escrita pero no me generó interés ( )

Man, this was a weird read. It's sort of semi-historical fiction, focused on Evita's embalmed corpse and the people obsessed with the body and the person. It's somewhat disjointed and plotless. I kept coming back to it, though. There's a hint of Pynchon in the puzzles, conspiracies, and attempt to put order onto a chaotic world. The publishers put a Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote on the front, clearly trying to lure in fans of his style of magical realism. I dunno if that's quite what I'd call this book. I think it's about the mystical and constructed quality of history and of who we make ourselves into and who we are made. ( )

This book from 1001 Books You Must read before You Die by author Tomas Eloy Martinez, Argentina author and translated by Helen Lane is the story of Eva Peron (after her death). I do not know much about Eva Peron. I never watched the play or movies. This story is full of magical realism but it is also very long and mostly a struggle to read. She was a saint to the common person of Argentina, she rose from poverty to be the wife of Peron. She died young. The story is written as a journalistic investigation into what happened to Eva after her death. It's a whole lot of story about a corpse and how soldiers fell for her but hated her even in her death. Plot is a bit over long. Characterization is that of Eva, Eva's people closest to her such as family but mostly it is about those involved after her death. Perhaps my not knowing Eva, not knowing the history of Argentina all affect my ability to enjoy this novel. ( )

An interesting book that focuses on what happened to Eva Peron's embalmed corpse from her death until it was finally buried in Buenos Aires two decades later after residing in the intelligence headquarters, a movie theater, an attic, a burial plot in Milan, Spain and then back to Argentina.

The story is told through the often contradictory perspectives of multiple and often unreliable and contradictory participants in the saga of the corpse with lots of flashbacks to her life and links between her life and her death. The author, Tomas Eloy Martinez, is himself a character, describing his writing of the book, defending it against critics, and putting it into the context of his previous book, The Peron Novel.

The book is thick with depictions of Peronism, a military state, paranoia, cult worship, madness, and uncertainty about reality. But it also meanders around a bit without fully connecting with the circle of characters around the corpse and without a story that sometimes spirals into tangents that feel irrelevant or difficult to follow. At the end, the Evita of the musical still leaves an overpowering impression that is barely displaced by the Santa Evita depicted in this book. ( )

I can't tell if this is fiction or not. I kept checking the cover for "Santa Evita : A Novel" but the "A Novel" part was never there. The title page has it listed under the Library of Congress as 'fiction' ... but I'd have to do much more (extensive!) research to make a determination.

Before I read this what I'd known of Evita was the disney-fied version of Andrew Llyod Weber/Tim Rice in their musical 'Evita' - this opened up whole new doors over who Eva Duarte Peron was, and what she meant to the country of Argentina. Even if this is a piece of historical fiction ... it's worth the read because I do think that it helps one to understand the mindset of the Argentinians at the time both before and after Eva Peron's death.

Excellent read. ( )

Santa Evita is a combination of fact, fiction, and fantasy about what happened to Eva Peron's body after her death. Adored by the poor of Argentina, Eva represented the hope and possibilities of the downtrodden who could maybe someday follow her meteoric path from a poor uneducated illegitimate child to the spiritual leader of her country. And her corpse was definitely a liability for the factions that opposed Peron. The true story behind what happened to Evita's body is fascinating. She was embalmed for display, but when Peron was overthrown by the military 3 years after her death, the military took her body to remove it as a symbol for Peronists. The body was stored in a van, behind the screen in a movie theater, in a warehouse and many other bizarre locations before it was buried anonymously in Italy. It was finally returned to Argentina after Peron came back into power. The novel creatively fills in the gap of what could have happened to Evita. Interesting story! ( )

"But who is this Santa Evita?
Why all this howling, hysterical sorrow?
What kind of goddess has lived among us?
How will we ever get by without her?"
- “Oh What A Circus” from “Evita”
(all the words in bold & italics are excerpts of verses from "Oh What A Circus")

Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez

“But who is this Santa Evita?”
To the loyal Peronists of Argentina Eva Peron was a Queen, a Royal Mother, a Saint, a Savior. Anti-Peronistas paint a far different picture: an overly ambitious woman who slept and manipulated her way to the top, and once there, abused her power. Her detractors had many names for her: a derogatory term “the Mare,” or simply “that bitch.” At the beginning of this historical novel, President Juan Peron has been ousted from power and is living in exile. The perfectly preserved and embalmed body of Eva Peron is in the government offices being immaculately taken care of by the embalmer Peron hired, a self-described “anatomist,” Dr. Ara. This leaves the new powers-that-be with a conundrum: what to do with Evita? She is, at the moment, perceived as the biggest threat to the new government. They refer to her simply as “… that Woman,” “... the Package,” “… the Deceased.” “That woman is more dangerous dead than she was alive. The tyrant knew it and that’s why he left her here … In any and every hovel there are photographs of her. The ignorant worship her like a saint. They think she can come back to life any day now and turn Argentina into a dictatorship of beggars.”

“Your queen is dead/your king is through/She’s not coming back to you”
Immediately after Evita entered immortality in the spiritual sense, her husband, Pres. Juan Peron, went to great lengths to ensure her immortality in the physical sense. Dr. Ara was paid huge sums of money to preserve Evita. Dr. Ara considered Eva his work of art. “The embalmer’s account was glowing. He maintained that after the injections and the fixatives, Evita’s skin had turned taunt and young, like that of a twenty-year old. Through her arteries there flowed a current of formaldehyde, paraffain, and zinc chloride. The whole body gave off a delicate aroma of almonds and lavender. The Colonel could not keep his eyes off the photographs that showed an ethereal, ivory-colored creature, possessed of a beauty that made a person forget all the other felicities of the universe. Her own mother, dona Juana Ibarguen, thinking that she had heard her breathing, had fainted during one of her visits. The widower had kissed her on the lips twice to break a spell that was perhaps that same as Sleeping Beauty’s …”

“Oh what a circus, oh what a show”
The new powers that be decide that “that Woman” must be gotten rid of. She needs to disappear. Various plans are made of to dispose of her quietly, discreetly and most of all, secretly. Three high-ranking officers from the Army are called in to take over the mission. During the operation, it comes to light that two waxed figures of Eva have been made; wax figures so life-like that the only way to tell the real Evita from her doll-copies is to take X-rays. The Colonel in charge of the mission makes a little star-shaped mark behind one of Evita’s earlobes. Only he, and he alone, will know which cadaver is the real Evita. A definite plan is made. Under cover of darkness, three different trucks will carry the three different Eva’s to three different eternal resting places. New common names are given to the Evitas; Santa Evita seems to be destined for an eternity of anonymity. Forces of nature, of God, of Darkness, of Evita, won’t allow this to happen so new plans are made, plans that take the officers around Argentina and also overseas. Time after time these plans go awry. Most devastating to the covert plans are the impromptu funereal shrines that magically appear no matter where Eva is. No matter the amount of steps taken to ensure the secrecy of their mission, and no matter where Evita is: in her homeland or overseas, the candles and flowers appear. The “Commanders of Vengeance” make their presence known and demand their Queen back.

“We’ve all gone crazy/Mourning all day and mourning all night/Falling over ourselves …”
Given the importance of the operation, the three officers go to great lengths to hide Evita. Each one of them, in some point in the story, takes care of Evita personally. Each one of them will pay: to live with Evita is a guaranteed descent into madness and obsession. They fall in love with her; there is a strong implication of necrophilia. The very men who hated Evita and saw her only as a ridiculous problem no longer calll her “that Woman,” or “the Deceased,” but “Person,” and “my little Eva.” “He too called her Beloved Mother when despair alighted in his heart. Beloved Mother. She was there, a few steps away, and he couldn’t touch her…. The colonel had been torturing himself for months for allowing Evita to go away. Nothing had any meaning without her … He was sick at heart from missing her so badly.”

As the story progresses, the mission to give Evita a final resting place becomes a shell game. It becomes harder and harder to figure out who is in possession of the real Evita and who has her clones. Interspersed throughout the chapters is the narrator/author’s first hand account of his research for the book. It’s hard to tell whether the author/narrator is Martinez or a character he has invented. This, I think, is the lesson of this unique novel: the lines of history, memory, myth, fiction and non-fiction are blurred. Aren’t they always? “As you said, it’s a novel,” I explained. “In novels, what is true is also false. Author’s rebuild at night the same myths they’ve destroyed in the morning.”

This is the question I was left with when I put this book down: where do we draw the line between fiction and fact? Where is the line that separates memory from history, history from memory, memory from myth? “Little by little Evita began to turn into a story that, before it ended, kindled another. She ceased to be what she said and what she did to become what people say she said and what people say she did. As her memory became incarnate and people unfolded within that body the folds of their own memories … {it} was emptied of its history.”

Maybe that’s why Eva Peron is so fascinating. She is history. She is a memory. She is a myth. “Evita was an enormous net that went out to catch desires as though reality were a field of butterflies.”

“You let down your people Evita
You were supposed to have been
Immortal
That’s all they wanted, not much to ask for
But in the end you could not deliver…” ( )

This complex book is well written and deftly translated. Its subject matter and style seem to place it squarely within the genre of magical realism, though much of the novel also seems to relate real facts apparently researched painstakingly by the author. It's always interesting to read, and at times amazing. ( )

Interesting novel based on the life of Eva Peron -- I'm left wondering how much is fact, how much is fictio, and if this poor woman will ever rest in peace. This is a very dense book, and it took me a long time to read it completely. ( )

An interesting book that focuses on what happened to Eva Peron's embalmed corpse from her death until it was finally buried in Buenos Aires two decades later after residing in the intelligence headquarters, a movie theater, an attic, a burial plot in Milan, Spain and then back to Argentina.

The story is told through the often contradictory perspectives of multiple and often unreliable and contradictory participants in the saga of the corpse with lots of flashbacks to her life and links between her life and her death. The author, Tomas Eloy Martinez, is himself a character, describing his writing of the book, defending it against critics, and putting it into the context of his previous book, The Peron Novel.

The book is thick with depictions of Peronism, a military state, paranoia, cult worship, madness, and uncertainty about reality. But it also meanders around a bit without fully connecting with the circle of characters around the corpse and without a story that sometimes spirals into tangents that feel irrelevant or difficult to follow. At the end, the Evita of the musical still leaves an overpowering impression that is barely displaced by the Santa Evita depicted in this book. ( )

Eva Peron, wife of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, is a somewhat mythical figure in Argentine history. After her death from cancer at the early age of 33, she became a cult figure--almost a saint--to the people of Argentina. On orders from Juan Peron, her body was preserved, and an elaborate shrine, similar to the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square, was planned for the display of her body to the masses. However, before the shrine could be built, Peron was ousted, and in 1955 Eva's body was seized by the military junta that took control of the country. Her body disappeared for the next 16 years.

In this novel (a novel in the sense that In Cold Blood is a novel), Martinez narrates a version of what happened to Eva's body during the 16 years it was missing, and the effects she had on those who were involved with the protection/hiding/transport of her body. It is not clear where fact ends and fiction begins. Martinez interviewed many of the participants and observers of this dance. The book has been called a 'postmodern fictional montage,' yet it is cited on Wikipedia as a factual source. At the very least, the book fills in some of the blank spaces in those mysterious 16 years. At the most, it is a fascinating recreation in life and in death of a unique woman and the country she so heavily influenced. ( )

Once I got into this I realised I had read it before. But it's an enjoyable book and easy to read so I continued with it. Eva Peron fascinates me, she came from nothing, a illegitamate child of an impoverished family, and became first lady of her country. Seen now by half of Argentina as a monster and the other half as a saint I think she will remain a puzzle for a long time yet. This book throws up some interesting questions, such as were there really three copies of her body made and where is the real one now. ( )

As intrigued as I was by the idea of a novel whose main character is a corpse, the parts of Tomás Eloy Martínez's Santa Evita that ended up interesting me most had almost nothing to do with its so-called plot. Because as much as Santa Evita is a novel "about" the late wife of a deposed politician (in which an ensemble cast of characters transport, steal, curse, duplicate, switch, covet, and defile the embalmed body of Eva Perón, in a non-chronological seesaw back and forth over the pivot-point of her death), it's also a playful, extended essay that meditates on the nature of storytelling itself: what makes a story "true"; when are sources "reliable"; exactly how real is "reality," and what is its relationship to text? Late in the novel, two characters have this exchange:

"As you said, it's a novel," I explained. "In novels, what is true is also false. Authors rebuild at night the same myths they've destroyed in the morning."

"Those are just words," Corominas said emphatically. "They don't convince me. The only thing that means anything are facts, and a novel, after all, is a fact."

Throughout Santa Evita, Martínez is grappling with just this question: to what extent is a novel an amorphous web of myths and legends, capable of telling "truth" only metaphorically, through a recreated web of lies? And on the contrary, to what extent is a novel a tangible, solid fact, capable of being argued with, contradicted, analyzed? To what extent can these two states coexist? At first, I assumed Martínez to be making a case for the lack of connection between reality and fiction, a case that, since a novel cannot recreate reality exactly, any wild fiction will say as much about reality as the most careful reportage. I saw him portraying the role of the author, as stated above by the character "Tomás Eloy Martínez," as someone destroying and rebuilding the same mythos over and over—a kind of impotent yet all-powerful Lady of Shalott, interacting with reality only at a vast remove. I heard him telling me not to look in his pages for a literal truth about Evita Perón, because written language can't transmit literal truth, but to seek instead for salient metaphors.

That, I thought, is where written language falls short. It can bring back to life feelings, lost time, chance circumstances that link one fact to another, but it can't bring reality back to life. I didn't yet know—and it would take longer still for me to feel it—that reality doesn't come back to life: it is born in a different way, it is transfigured, it reinvents itself in novels. I didn't know that the syntax or the tones of voice of the characters return with a different air about them and that, as they pass through the sieves of written language, they become something else.

They become "something else"—but what relation does this "something else" hold to its original model? Is it "only" the stuff of myths, reflecting what the audience needs or believes rather than the experience of the original human? Is there, indeed, any "reality" inherent in the subjective experience of an individual, or any reality that should be privileged above the transfigured reality of history and myth? If I felt frightened in a given situation, and a storyteller tells a convincing version of my story in which I feel instead angry or tender, are those two versions of my story different but equal? Or is one more "real" than the other?

With the response of Corominas above, I realized that Martínez's stance is more complicated than I had at first assumed. True, the "real people" who feature as characters in this novel are different than their actual real-life counterparts, but different in a way not easy to articulate. They are "transfigured," but only incompletely, problematically. Their transfiguration doesn't replace one thing (the dead reality) with another (a new reality), but layers new perspectives on top of old until "reality" becomes a palimpsest of texts and real-life events inscribing themselves on top one another ad infinitum. About the Peróns' marriage certificate, for example, the narrator writes:

The marriage is not false, but almost everything the document says is, from beginning to end. At the most solemn and historical moment of their lives, the contracting parties, as the phrase was in those days, decided to perpetrate an Olympian hoax on history. Perón lied about the place where the ceremony was performed and about his civil status; Evita lied about her age, her place of residence, the city she had been born in. Their statements were obviously false, but twenty years went by before anyone questioned them. In 1974, in his book Perón, the Man of Destiny, the biographer Enrique Pavón Pereyra nonetheless declared that they were true. [...] They lied because they had decided that, from that moment on, reality would be what they wanted it to be. They did the same thing novelists do.

In Martínez's analysis, the marriage certificate is a figurative "novel": it represents something true (the marriage between Juan and Eva Perón), which is nonetheless made up entirely of lies. And yet, Martínez's own narrative goes on to demonstrate that the Peróns' power to dictate their own reality by fiat was limited: "deciding reality would be what they wanted it to be" could not stop the rumors of illegitimacy that plagued Evita's public image, could not elide the age difference between them or erase the existence of Juan's first wife. These issues could not be declared away; on the other hand, as Martínez points out, the marriage itself was incontrovertibly real.

In other words, I believe Martínez is arguing for a middle ground between the collective and the individual, between "what's-true-is-also-false" and "novel-as-fact." The Peróns exercise real power in dictating their identities via their marriage certificate, but that power also has real limits. Text is an interactive part of reality, although it cannot replace reality or even, necessarily, represent it directly. A novelist cannot repeat reality, so he invents it again; but he cannot reinvent it in a way unconnected from the reality that came before. And once he reinvents it, the new reality exists somewhere between his invention and the state that preceded it; neither can exist without the other.

One of my favorite intersections of reality and text (or actually, text and meta-text) happens throughout the first half of the novel, when the narrator is repeatedly struck by the resemblance between real-life events and the Jorge Luis Borges story "Death and the Compass." Initially, the narrator only mentions the story as a passing reference to the way in which Peronism influenced Borges himself:

Without Perón's terror, Borges's labyrinths and mirrors would lose a substantial part of their meaning. Without Perón, Borges's writing would lack provocations, refined techniques of indirection, perverse metaphors.

But the similarities between Santa Evita and "Death and the Compass" become stronger as the character of Colonel Moori Koenig is fleshed out. A little background: in Borges's story, a detective becomes obsessed with the murder of a rabbi who died surrounded by kabbalistic books, and with two subsequent murders that seem to be connected to the first. In a Poirot-style exercise, he confounds his action-based colleagues by "solving" the murders using only textual analysis of the late rabbi's books, and the application to a map of the city a geometrical cypher based on equilateral triangles and rhombi. All this only to find, when he arrives at the murderer's lair, that the whole series of crimes has been a setup, engineered to trick him to his own death; the entire narrative leading him into the villain's obsessively symmetrical labyrinth lair has been false.

Similarly, the narrator in Martínez's novel initially notes that Colonel Koenig becomes obsessed with an assignment that leads to his own destruction. But the similarities don't stop there: it turns out that the Colonel, like Borges's villian, is obsessed with symmetry, even going so far as to excuse a freakish swarm of bees on the excuse that "the bees were not disrupting the symmetrical order of life." He superstitiously avoids saying Evita's name, even in his own mind, an aversion that mirrors the Orthodox Jewish prohibition on uttering the Name of God. Later on, when trying to dispose of Evita's body and its copies, the Colonel actually employs almost the exact same geometrical cypher to a map of Buenos Aires that Borges's detective did in "Death and the Compass." At this point, as readers, we are reacting not only to the likelihood of such symmetry between a fictional Colonel and a fictional detective, but remembering that Martínez's narrative is to some extent based on FACT—did this scene from Borges actually come to life? The narrator himself interrupts his informant, Cifuentes, to remark on the surreal similarity between the Colonel's real-life actions and Borges's short story—doesn't Cifentes think it incredible that both men overlaid equilateral triangles/rhombi on a map of the city?

He refused to concede the fact. Although I have read little Borges, he said [or rather lied], I have some memory of that story. I know that it is influenced by the Kabbala and by Hasidic traditions. To the Colonel, the slightest allusion to anything Jewish would have been unacceptable. His plan was inspired by Paracelsus, who is Luther's counterpart, and at the same time the most Aryan of Germans. The other difference, he said to me, is more important. Detective Lönnrott's ingenious game in "Death and the Compass" is a deadly one, but it takes place only within a text. What the Colonel was plotting was to happen, however, outside of literature, in a real city through which an overwhelmingly real body was to be transported.

The layers of irony are almost overwhelming here, but let me try to unpack them. First of all, Cifuentes's response highlights a huge difficulty with transfiguring any set of events into story-hood: who can agree on which elements are "key"? To me, it's a pretty incredible coincidence that a real-life Colonel would happen across the same bizarre, geometric method of corpse-disposal as one used in a particular short story; the equilateral triangles/rhombi, the obsession with symmetry, the aversion to saying a given name, all line up quite eerily. But to Cifuentes, these points are irrelevant because the Colonel was anti-Semitic and the details of Borges's story concerned Judaism. Not only is this ironic because the Jewish backdrop of the story seems (to me) a petty detail, but also because, within Borges's own context, it turns out to be totally faked—the murders actually involve no kabbalistic attempt to know the name of God; they are just a ploy to murder the main character.

What's more, Cifuentes's second objection takes on a layer of irony given that, as he and his narrative are transfigured into parts of Martínez's novel, the events he describes ARE taking place within literature, and for all the reader knows, they may be just as fictional as those evoked by Borges! And can we really claim that Eva Péron's body is "overwhelmingly real" when it has been artificially preserved to the point when nobody can tell the difference between it and a wax copy? To top it all off, Cifuentes's entire denial of the "Death and the Compass" similarities is rendered suspect by Martínez's own parenthetical claim that Cifuentes is lying about how much Borges he has read.

In short, the Argentine mantle of meta cast off by Borges and Cortázar has obviously not been abandoned. A big thanks to Richard for introducing me to the next generation of South American literary mind-games in the shape of Tomás Eloy Martínez and Santa Evita.

Enthralling; leaves the reader hungry, for more stories, for more truth. What is truth and what is fiction? Just one of the questions dealt with in the novel, along with questions of the relationship of the story-teller to the the story, of a country to its myths. Does something have to be real to be true? ( )

The most boring book on the face of the earth. Don't bother reading it.