Santa Evita

Llegué a esta novela de Eloy Martínez, publicada en 1995, por un reportaje del Programa Conectados en CNN a propósito del lanzamiento de la serie de Star+: Santa Evita en el septuagenario de la muerte de Eva Duarte de Perón (26 de julio, 2022). De hecho, vi primero la serie de siete episodios y luego leí la novela.Tanto la serie en Netflix como la novela cautivan la atención pero ciertamente la obra presenta mayores matices, con muchos pasajes alucinantes propios de un autor que sucumbió a la fascinación de Evita, estructurando el relato bajo la forma de reportaje periodístico en una mezcla de novela histórica y policial, con las licencias propias de la ficción que el propio autor advierte en el texto.Si en Vigilar y castigar, Foucault considera la intrincada relación cuerpo-poder, en Santa Evita, esta relación con diversas facetas y aristas, se teje a partir del cuerpo inerte de Eva Duarte de Perón, o mejor, simplemente Evita, que yace desde mediados de los 70 en la bóveda de la familia Duarte en el cementerio de La Recoleta.

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 away from it the imagination, the foolishness, the indiscretion, the exaggeration, and the defeat that are the raw materials without which literature is inconceivable?""[The Peróns] lied because they could no longer tell what was true and what was false, and because, consummate actors both, they had begun to portray themselves in other roles. 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.""She would outdo him by virtue of the weight of her love for him. The one who loves the most has the most power . . . . The vastness of her love included everything. It embraced her husband as well, it encompassed him. In other words, it devoured him.""Evita is the return to the horde, the anthropophagous instinct of the species, the ignorant beast that bursts blindly into the glassware shop of beauty.""If we'd killed the embalmer, the body would have decomposed all by itself. It's too big a body now, bigger than the country. It's too full of things. We've all kept putting something into it: s--t, hatred, wanting to kill it again.""We thought that in Argentina, which prided itself on being Cartesian and European, there was no place for any delirious notions of reality."

I have described this novel as unputdownable, but there were many times when I needed to put it down just to draw breath and shake my head in disbelief. I have to admit I knew next to nothing of Evita Perón before entering this "stranger than fiction" account of her life, told backwards from death to childhood, and forwards as Eloy Martínez pursues her sequestered corpse and the destinies of its captors. As a novel I found it hard to untangle what might be purely novelistic aspects, such as the later Reeperbahn episode, but most of what I could check proved astonishingly true to the story. At first I did not like the intrusion of Eloy Martínez as a protagonist in the story, but later I appreciated that the novel is also in part a case study in how the past is reconstructed and re-represented where reality fact history and fiction collide. The story of this nondescript unexceptional woman rising from rags to power to gain a near-Religious or supernatural mystique binding an entire nation bends reality fact history fiction until they are devoured by myth, of which Perón is the sole inhabitant. Whatever the failings or lapses of this book, Eloy Martínez does an excellent job of weaving together the contrasting even inimical strands of Perón's story, her life and beyond, in an absorbing riveting and provocative way. As a non-native-Spanish-language reader I read this novel without difficulty. I rate the novel very highly in every respect. Just be prepared to have your breath knocked out of you!!!

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.

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.

The media could not be loaded.  Review number three in my Evita series.  Santa Evita  (see also  Santa Evita  ) is a masterpiece that blurs the margins between fact and fiction, as it weaves the dramatic and poignant story of Evita's embalmed body, which was stolen and hidden by the government after Peron was overthrown in 1955. Santa EvitaSanta Evita

Narrativa impactante ( até macabra em alguns trechos) que mistura história e ficção . É mais uma tentativa de entender a devoção que se criou em torno de Evita, apesar do desprezo que a "elite" argentina tinha por ela.

Loved this book, and Eloy Martinez' style. I don't know much other than the Lloyd Webber musical ( which Eloy Martinez likes to bring up about folks like us). His diabolical plots about the fake Evitas kept me guessing about what reeally happened. This play with reality seems to mark Latin American lit (I am new to this) as opposed to Magical Realism of Garcia Marquez. The characters are so believable and his references to film footage makes it have an ai of truth to what's going on.

Cuando recibí el libro me entusiasmó, pero cuando lo abrí me di cuenta que estaba en inglés y no podré leerlo.