Santa Evita [Paperback]

I've been fascinated by the legend of Eva Peron for over 10 years now and I've always wondered why there hasn't been a full length book based on the mysterious (and disturbing) circumstances surrounding her embalmed corpse. After all, we're talking about one of the 20th century's most controversial and fascinating woman and her astonishing story did not end at her death of uterine cancer in 1952. Eva Peron's cancer ravaged body was preserved and restored to it's former beauty and radiance. It took the embalmer several years to finish his masterpiece and when he was done, Juan Peron was exciled and Eva's body kidnapped. Her whereabouts were a mystery for several years. Despite the fascinating subject, this book failed to keep me intrigued. Don't get me wrong, it was cleverly written but far too long and the book looses it's reader half way through.
It should be noted that even Eva Peron's most hardened critics will cringe when reading about the mistreatment (and molestation) of her corpse. It's not hard to see why so many loved Eva Peron in life (after all she was a strikingly beautiful young woman and at her physical peak- rivalled even the most glamorous of film stars) but it's still a mystery to me as to why so many were compelled to commit "ungodly" acts to her corpse. Witnesses do claim that Eva's mummy was unforgettable and lovely, so we may understand to a certain degree as to why Dr. Pedro Ara fell in love with it (it was HIS masterpeice, his fantasy), but he wasn't the only one of Eva's after death admirers. A horney General and even a young girl (who innocently mistook her for a life-sized Barbie doll) are included on that list. That said- being stared at and sexually touched after death is unforgivable and morbid.
The book also deals (briefly) with Eva Peron's past (Eva's early life in the pampas, her early career as an actress and her transformation from a pale, unimpressive brunette to the blonde goddess she was to become) through flashbacks and the author does include some of his own comments on the subject.
Many of Eva's hardcore fans will find this interesting reading. I did too, but somehow it didn't grab hold of my attention the way I had originally anticipated. It's a welcoming addition to Eva's catalogue but somehow lacking and sometimes tedious as well.

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.

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.