Santa Evita

Rating:
Summary: Santa Evita's macabre populism in third world syncretism
Review: Perhaps no book written to date has better captured the incorruptibility of the female body as well as its uneasy alignment with "the body corporeal" (of the masses) in the way in which Martinez's Santa Evita does. As Evita's lavendered and glowing corpse is treated by careless military men and the vissicitudes of politics and time so is Argentina unexpurgated. Divulging the whereabouts of the corpse and the near transcendental and clairvoyant effect this masterpiece of embalming has on various Argentinians under and after the Peron regime; Martinez takes us further still deeper into his personal epiphany steeped in paradox as an "involved" journalist and captive audience of his own novel and its unravelling in time. Credibly Martinez gives a deep truth to the mundane and the profound-- sacred and profane spirit of the "elect person." That Evita may have been selected from the common trough... that she was selfmade and that she wa! s the heroine with at least two faces is obvious enough and this Evita so silent becomes in the thoughts and recitives of others: an understanding, a destroyer of life, a bringer of gifts, a dolly, and a trollop to name but a few of her many incarnations. Is it no wonder that with so many Eva Peron's rolled into one diminutive woman who died of ovarian cancer at 33... that one perfectly preserved Eva could never be enough to serve as a functionary and so in a strange shell game we are given several... of course none so impeccable as the original nor as important to the affairs of god and man! Since this review is written subsequent to the death of the English "Popular Princess" Diana and in the wake of her historic funeral and memory as well as to the distortion through the fish eye of an avid press and population the truth of Santa Evita could not be more timely. A historic monument of myth made flesh again as this book decides not to settle in immutable spac! es and interstices but like the corpse takes on several par! allel forms from radio broadcast to historic speech in which Evita does not accept the vice presidency. Martinez wields his pen sometimes like a scalpel and sometimes as a lover with an excusably purple pen. Simply astonishing.

Rating:
Summary: A literary work of art
Review: Seeing that "the only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again," Tomás Eloy Martínez brilliantly transposes Evita's postmortem journey into an outrageous postmodern fictional montage wherein the author, represented as a fictitious character and narrator in the novel, spins a web of biography, history and myth into a effervescently farcical and sombrely perverse narrative, mellifluously illuminating the woman who "ceased to be what she said and what she did to become what people say she said and what people say she did." The end-result is a gripping tale which sheds new light upon details that biographers and historians commonly leave behind, seeking to unfold "the unexplained blank spaces" of her domain while tracking the political, mythical, historical body of desires which Evita's cadaver, the body of the nation, incorporates. And quite marvellously, in the interim, the textuality of Santa Evita undrapes the roots of the complex set of relations which provide an understanding of the corpus of discursive regularities that extend the representation of Argentina to Evita's embalmed cadaver as the novel bares and reconstructs the miracles, desires, secrets, and mysteries including the fragments and revelations which triggered the narrative flow, as "little by little Evita began to turn into a story that, before it ended, kindled another." Simply put, a literary work of art.

Rating:
Summary: A Slight Mistake In the Book Description
Review: There is a slight error in the book description. General Juan Domingo Perón was NOT a dictator, he was voted for by the general public of Argentina and put into power by them. A dictator is one who forces himself into a political position and rules without restraint. Furthermore, a dictator is a tyrant and Perón was no such thing. But of course, you will see that in the book...