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Frank Wynne

Purgatory Hardcover – 7 Nov. 2011

by Tomas Eloy Martinez (Author), Frank Wynne (Translator)

3.8 12 ratings

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Purgatorio is Martínez's most moving, most autobiographical novel and yet it is also a ghost story, the ghost story which has been Argentina's history since 1973. It begins, 'Simón Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday.' Simón, a cartographer like Emilia, had vanished during one of their trips to map an uncharted country road. Later testimonies had confirmed that he had been one of the thousands of victims of the military regime - arrested, tortured and executed for being a "subversive." Yet Emilia had refused to believe this account, and had spent her entire life waiting for him to reappear. Now in her sixties, the Simón she has found is identical to the man she lost three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martínez masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history -both personal and political. Just as Simón's disappearance comes to represent the thousands of disappearances that became such a common occurrence during the dictatorship, so Emilia's refusal to accept his death mirror's the country's unwillingness to face its reality.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date

7 Nov. 2011
Dimensions

13.5 x 2.4 x 21.6 cm
ISBN-10

1408811456
ISBN-13

978-1408811450
See all details

Product description

Review

Praise for The Tango Singer

'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)

Book Description

The last memorable novel by the author of The Tango Singer, one of Latin America's leading novelists until his death in January 2010.

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:
3.8 12 ratings

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Frank Wynne
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Frank Wynne
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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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3.8 out of 5

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Paul Walter

Chimeras walk among us

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 February 2021

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Between 1976 and 1983 the military junta in Argentina murdered 30,000 and imprisioned 12,000 of its own citizens many of whom simply were disappeared. The regime collaborated in the CIA founded operation Condor with other South American states to pursue dissidents across borders. In desperation at the failure of their neo-liberal economics and popular discontent, the regime launched the Falklands / Malvinas invasion, its failure led to the fall of dictatorship.

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.

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Mr. P. I. Browne

Exceptional

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 October 2021

Verified Purchase

I read this twice this year, and with no lessening of my enjoyment the second time. The author manages to do something extraordinary in this book. It deals with a terrible period of history in a way that isn't sensationalist, but is humane and subtle. He deals with the nature of loss in a way that has a wide application to all of us, and how we use our imagination to deal with loss. Non of the images or metaphors feel at all strained - they arise naturally out of the text, and he manages to do that extraordinarily difficult thing - to write what is at bottom a realist novel, while dealing with things which aren't real. The authorial presence seems entirely natural, and there is no 'post-modern' trickery about the book, although it manages to shift between fact and fiction seemessly. A wonderful book on so many levels, with hardly a false note.

Helpful

The Ghost of Simon Dupuy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2015

This was one of those books that I could see was well-written but which I'm afraid I found myself disliking very much. It's a strange mixture of ghost story and slightly fantastical take on the troubled history of Argentina over the last fifty or so years. Emilia Dupuy is a political refugee from Argentina, now settled in New Jersey. She lives a quiet, uneventful life with few friends, mourning the disappearance of her husband Simon many years ago. Then, suddenly one day she glimpses Simon in a university cafeteria. But the odd thing is that he seems still the same age as when he vanished all those years ago. Soon, Simon is meeting Emilia at her apartment for secret trysts. In between his visits, Emilia confides about Simon's reappearance to the unnamed narrator, who seems - from his nationality, job and background - to be none other than Eloy Martinez himself. Increasingly fascinated by why Emilia should imagine that her husband has returned, Eloy Martinez gets her to talk about her past. And gradually, a disturbing tale of a woman brutally treated by her dictatorial father, and victim to an oppressive regime, unfolds.

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.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 June 2014

This is a study of the 'disappeared' Argentina, and its style and storyline reflects in some measure the bizarreness of that time.

One person found this helpful

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Howler

Boring.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2015

This is an utterly boring plot. I had to give up half way through, even though I hate not finishing a book. Nothing happens apart from a series of flashbacks.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2012

I read this book along with three other Argentinian novels recommended in the Economist and all were superb. Tomas eloy martinez was new to me but I will certainly be reading other novels of his. The writing is passionate yet clear - no 'clever' gimmicks, not trying to be the next big thing, just literary skill. And i love the central ghostly theme ...you kind of know but keep wondering.... A marvellous book about family relationships and the psychology of loss, set in heady political times. I gobbled it up in a day, then read bits of it again. Definitely recommendeded.

12 people found this helpful

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Purgatory Hardcover – 7 Nov. 2011

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Frank Wynne

Frank Wynne

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