Santa Evita [Hardcover]

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."

As an avid reader of Evita books and collector of items this book was an altogether different kettle of fish. Forget biased biographies and slightly dubious facts - this book is fictional novel that describes the fate of Evita after her death and how her myth and presence lives on. Whilst the author defines the book as a fictional novel, he also tells you that all his research is real and he discovers people that have never been contacted before to prove his story. This is an essential book for all Evita fanatics - its a whole new point to the story!

Santa Evita is written in documentary style, and at times it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that this is in essence a work of fiction, the story of what happened to Eva Perons body after Juan Peron fell from power. The detail is startling, and sometimes disturbing. It drags you by the hand and is very difficult to leave. A very absorbing and troubling novel, this is not for the fainthearted, or the light reader.