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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A literary work of art,
By A Customer
This review is from: Santa Evita (Hardcover)
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.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Decidely Postmodern "Tissue of Different Versions",
This review is from: Santa Evita (Paperback)
This novel is sure to spawn 10,000 dissertations in comparative literature. It is an extremely self-conscious work --- in fact, this gets to be too much at times. If you're into Deconstruction, then Santa Evita will thrill you. If you're looking for a straightforward narrative, then it will mystify you --- it's the literary equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle. Since my knowledge of the whole Evita phenomenon and the sociopolitical scene the novel engages is superficial, much of this work went over my head. I expect that it is laced with clever political puns that I missed. Fortunately, Martinez's gift for felicitous phrasing shines through even in translation. In my opinion, the desires projected onto Evita's body (both political and personal) do make for interesting reading, but Martinez's many digressions on memory and the reconstruction of "reality" shamelessly hammer in a theme that's become far too trendy these days. Relatedly, his obstinate insistence that the truth only exists in versions can be heavy-handed at times, especially if you compare it to the subtle and brilliant way that someone like Lev Tolstoy (or even Andrei Makine) treats the same theme. In spite of these factors, Santa Evita is a good novel, with some truly excellent passages here and there. It seems almost heretical not to love it, but I have to admit I didn't. Sorry, but that's my version of the truth.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great historical novel,
By
This review is from: Santa Evita (Paperback)
T. Eloy Martínez offers a truly special portrayal of Argentina's
first lady, Eva Perón. The story of her wandering cadaver is haunting, tragic and at times quite hilarious, and always mind-blowing. I recommend this novel. (I'm not sure the English translation is decent, so if you can, read it in Spanish). It's a great example of the poststructuralist novel of the 20th century.
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