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Purgatory Hardcover – 7 Nov. 2011
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- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
- Publication date7 Nov. 2011
- Dimensions13.5 x 2.4 x 21.6 cm
- ISBN-101408811456
- ISBN-13978-1408811450
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Review
'At times reminiscent of Paul Auster, The Tango Singer has the makings of a satisfying thriller' (Daily Telegraph)
'One of Latin America's most celebrated contemporary writers ... The Tango Singer is a work of hallucinatory brilliance' (Guardian)
'Gloriously mysterious ... a rich and delicious experience ... His writing is satisfyingly sharp and eccentric' (Independent on Sunday)
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About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing (7 Nov. 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1408811456
- ISBN-13 : 978-1408811450
- Dimensions : 13.5 x 2.4 x 21.6 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 3,122,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 194,744 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- 211,223 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the authors

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FRANK WYNNE has translated over fifty works from French and Spanish by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Ahmadou Kourouma, Tomás González and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In the course of his career, his translations have earned him the IMPAC Prize for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq (2002), the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2005), and he has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation in 2008 and most recently in 2016 for Harraga by Boualem Sansal. He is a two-time winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, for Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (2012) and for The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto (2014). His translations have been awarded the CWA International Dagger in three consecutive years. He has spent time as translator in residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyons and at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.
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The disappearances and imprisonment of 1.5% of the population put families in purgatory, the title is apt.
Martinez grapples with this tsunami of grief and dislocation through the eyes of exiled Emilia seeing her husband somehow alive in a New York diner 30 years after his death. Their love story is the kaleidescope illustrating the enormity of the times referencing actual events with surrealist skill. I have seen a comment that Martinez is cold and impersonal about Emila and Simon's relationship but I think this unfair. Emila's wedding night may have been a disaster but her honeymoon was joyful, the escape from her parents tyranny but cut short another more terrible.
Frank Wynne's translation is excellent sustaining the Martinez' lyricism. Do not be put off by the political backdrop or the surrealism. The themes are absolutely contemporary of love and loss, exile and the consequences of oppression.
Carolina de Robertis novel Perla is a surreal first person love story with a disappeared partner which I highly recommend as a companion read. Sheila Cassidy, Audacity to Believe is also highly recommended. Her autobiography of the period she was a christian nurse to the poor in Chile is a beacon of courage, love and caring in terrible circumstances.
All credit to Eloy Martinez, he portrays the political disfunction of his country at certain stages of the 20th century brilliantly, and concisely (this is a short book, that can be read in an evening). Emilia's life story is horribly believable and memorable, and some of the descriptions of the changing landscape of the country both politically and architecturally during her lifetime are very fine. But, bearing in mind the trauma Emilia has suffered, I found this a rather cold book. I didn't find the passages meant to be humorous (as when Emilia's brutal father, now a high-up political figure, meets Orson Welles and keeps calling him 'Orsten', or when her mother is treated for cancer by an astrologer of some kind) at all funny. The narrator seems to take an oddly clinical attitude to Emilia's grief and show her little understanding - this comes over particularly strong in the final scene, where the implication seems to be that 'oh well, Emilia's gone mad and there's nothing I can do about it'. The Simon scenes range between hazy sometimes quite banal dialogue (a long passage about Japanese takeaways) and some very 'purple' sex scenes - I particularly liked the way that Simon apparently 'rode' Emilia like one of her father's thoroughbred stallions! The book's (and narrator's) lack of true compassion, and the endless woes suffering by Emilia made it increasingly, bleakly depressing - and the sort of book that makes one truly dread becoming old: Emilia was left at the end with nothing but her fantasies.
This was a brilliant evocation of political disfunction, but a book that on the human level I found so unhappy I'm not sure I could bear to revisit it again.