Santa Evita (Spanish Edition)

Covering the strange and frequently macabre journey inflicted upon the embalmed body of Eva Peron, interspersed with snippets from her life and relections of her rise to become the First Lady of Argentina, this is a dream like, unusual novel in which fact and fiction blur and eventually lose focus. This is too dark, too macabre to be enjoyable, although it is captivating and for the most page turning reading. Evita's spell in life and in death on those she encountered runs through the book, as does the rather bizarre fascination her body held for some of those entrusted with its safe keeping. It is something of a relief that she may now rest in peace, restored to Argentina, and properly buried in sanctified ground although this is only touched on very briefly at the end of the book.

Interesante pero increíble. Visitamos el Museo de Evita en Buenos Aires y movieron su cuerpo varías veces pero seguramente no apareció en un club de tira

Que es mas historia que novela. Muy entretenida y nutritiva en información. Muestra el valor, la pasión y la divisón por Eva Perón viva y después de viva, porque Ella no muere.

I was very disappointed in this novel. Evita Peron had an amazing life and the details of her afterlife and the corpse odyssey are really intriguing. You would have to work to make the life of Eva Peron boring, right? Well, yes. And Martinez has done that. It begins with Evita's musings on her death bed, but it is very jarring after the first chapter. Martinez moves back and forth between Evita's life, interviews with those who knew her, his own musings, and fictional stories about her corpse. It seems almost weird not to like it, but I found myself forcing myself to finish. I would rather read about Evita's own thoughts or her own view of life and her impact on Argentine history. It's a very good effort and well written, but jarring. I recommend the Fraser and Navarro biography as well as the Dujone Ortiz bio. Both are biographies but much more entertaining. Sorry, but this just doesn't do it for me.

This book was published in 1995 by Tomás Eloy Martínez, an Argentinian who lived in the United States, and translated into English the following year. It recounted fragmented episodes from Eva Perón's life and decline, recovered mainly from the memories of various people who'd known her, as reported accurately or otherwise by the author. Mixed into this were the story of what happened to her embalmed body following her death in 1952, as the government that had overthrown her husband's regime sought to obliterate her memory, together with the author's fitful meditations on the nature of reality, her life's meaning and the significance of it all. Making Perón's corpse the center of the novel and focus of everyone's attention was a fantastic conceit. The author searched in the present day for clues to her life, while in the past the paranoid military officials sought haplessly to hide or dispose of her indestructible body and its copies. That a number of these episodes apparently happened or were based on fact was surreal, rivaling imaginary creations of magic realists. At the same time, putting a silent corpse at the book's center meant certain limitations in the narrative, and eventually this reader's interest flagged. Though the "facts" from life were riveting, in the book's second half the reminiscences and meditations started becoming a bit tiresome. The last few chapters, set mainly in Europe, were barely readable, as if the author had lost interest in narrating events coherently after the government shipped Eva Perón abroad. It was more important for the author to keep her as an unknowable void, a blank screen on which everyone projected their emotions throughout, than to creatively imagine her speaking at the end from the grave. Given the novel's focus on the officials' obsessions with the body and their unhappy fates, it was a surprise that nothing was made of her husband's own obsession, keeping her body with him near the end of his exile in Spain. And little was made of her eventual return to Buenos Aires and interment in Recoleta Cemetery, the famed city of the dead. One would've thought such circumstances would be rich in symbolism for the author. Finally, what did it add up to? The novel was a monument, perhaps, to people's capacity to deceive themselves, to trade reality for myth, to lose themselves in absurd dramas, to become unhinged. To the mysterious gap between what Perón started out in life as and what she became, and her transformation again in death. And to her impact on the memory of a nation, and on the author. Some excerpts: "Reality is not a straight line but a system of forking paths." "Why does history have to be a story told by sensible people and not the delirious raving of losers . . .? If history -- as appears to be the case -- is just another literary genre, why take aw...