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Eva Peron entered immortality on 26th July, 1952. The bizarre after-life of her embalmed body - hidden, hijacked, replicated, smuggled abroad, buried, resurrected, repatriated - echoed her equally strange life. From the story of the plain poor-trash girl who reinvented herself to become first the uncrowned queen of Argentina's masses and then their uncanonized saint, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a mesmerizing, highly readable work of fiction.
Blends fact and fiction about the legendary Eva Peron, wife of the Argentinian dictator.
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.
Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural. Bruno is increasingly drawn to the mystery of Martel and his strange and evocative performances in a series of apparently arbitrary sites around the city. As Bruno tries to find Martel, he begins to untangle the story of the singer's life, and to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances map a dark labyrinth of the city's past.
“One of the most original and entertaining books to come out of Latin America in recent years.”—Mario Vargas Llosa On June 20, 1973, General Juan Peron, the most revered—as well as the most hated—dictator in the history of Argentina, returned to his homeland after eighteen years of exile. His arrival was the occasion for a fratricidal massacre. Less than a year later, Peron was dead. The throngs that filed past his body as it lay in state were as vast and impassioned as those that had mourned his wife, Evita, the music hall performer Peron had turned into Argentina’s secular saint and who embalmed corpse he had turned into his personal talisman. Out of the facts of this enigmatic...
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story...
Vacationing in Madrid with her husband and newborn son, Luz, a twenty-one-year-old Argentinean, secretly searches for her real father, a political activist who disappeared during the country's dictatorship in the 1970s. Original.
His mother calls him a worthless halfwit while his fellow drunks at the local bar ensure he's the butt of all their jokes. He spends his days whittling wood, counting pigeons and adding his own name to the list on the town war memorial. So how could Germain possibly anticipate what a casual encounter on a park bench with eighty-five-year old Margueritte might mean? In this touchingly comic tale of an unusual friendship, that first conversation opens a door into a world Germain has never imagined—the world of books and ideas—and gives both him and Margueritte the chance of a happiness they thought had passed them by.
Examines work by writers and journalists from Latin America and the US who adopted fiction to expose how governments controlled and misrepresented events.