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La protagonista de esta novela es el cuerpo de Eva Duarte de Perón, una belleza en vida y una hermosura etérea después de embalsamarla. Diosa, reina, señora, madre, benefactora, arbitro de la moda y modelo nacional de comportamiento. Santa Evita para unos y para otros una analfabeta resentida, trepadora, loca y ordinaria, presidenta de una dictadura de mendigos. A su muerte, su cuerpo embalsamado se hace tan grande como todo el país, y en un enloquecedor viaje se confunde con un pueblo también a la deriva que no ha perdido la esperanza de su regreso.

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On coming out of a faint that lasted more than three days, Evita was certain at last that she was going to die. The terrible pains in her abdomen had gone away, and her body was clean again, alone with itself, in a bliss without time or place. Only the idea of death still hurt her. The worst part about death was not that it occurred. The worst part about death was the whiteness, the emptiness, the loneliness of the other side: one's body racing off like a galloping steed. Although the doctors kept telling her that her anemia was in remission and that in a month or less she would regain her health, she barely had the strength left to open her eyes. She was unable to get out of bed no matter how intently she focused her energies on her elbows and heels, and even the slight effort of turning over on one side or the other to relieve the pain left her breathless. She did not seem to be the same person who had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1935 without a penny to her name, and who acted in hopeless theaters where her pay was a cup of coffee with milk. She was nothing or less than nothing then: a sparrow at an outdoor laundry sink, a caramel bitten into, so skinny it was pitiful. She began to make herself look pretty with passion, memory, and death. She wove herself a chrysalis of beauty, little by little hatching a queen, who would have ever thought it? ...Nobody realized her illness not only made her thinner but also made her more hunched up. Since they let her wear her husband's pajamas till the end, Evita drifted about more and more aimlessly inside that vast expanse of cloth. "Don't you think I look like a Jibaro, a pygmy?" she said to the ministers standing around her bed. They answered her with adulation: "Don't say that senora. If you're a pygmy, what can we be: lice, microbes?" And they changed the subject. The nurses, however, turned her reality upside down: "See how well you've eaten today?" they kept saying as they took away the dishes she hadn't touched. "You look plumper, senora." They fooled her like a child, and the rage burning inside her, with no way out, was what made her gasp for breath: more than her illness, than her decline, than the senseless terror of waking up dead and not knowing what to do." Excerpted from Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Library Journal Review

It's a rare novel whose central character dies in the first few pages, but then this is not really the story of Argentine First Lady Evita Perón but of her hold on the imagination of her country, in life and death. When Evita dies, her husband has her remains preserved, and Martínez (The Perón Novel, Pantheon, 1988) focuses on the fate of the body as it is lost and regained in power struggles to see who will control Argentina. "Everybody who had anything to do with the corpse came to a bad end," exclaims one woman to the narrator, a shadowy presence who could be the author himself, as the work is almost documentary in style ("In this novel peopled by real characters, the only ones I never met were Evita and the Colonel"). Wonderfully constructed, the novel is full of subtle, sardonic observations ("The body lay in state for twelve days beneath the towering giraffe dome . . . where she had been drained of her life's blood answering the pleas of the multitudes") that keep it from being swallowed by the mythology surrounding Evita. Never fear, this is not another celebrity ripoff (It's a musical! It's a movie! It's a novel!) but a class act.‘Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Where fiction ends and fact begins is one of the intriguing puzzles of this perverse and enigmatic but highly readable "novel" about the afterlife of Eva Perón, the small-time actress who turned her marriage to an Argentine dictator into a mythical career as the soul of that erratic and unhappy nation. Martínez (The Peron Novel, 1988) casts himself as a sort of investigative journalist digging out the strange tale of Evita's corpse; but what he does with the material is far from journalistic, embracing instead a sense of mournful comedy. There seems little doubt that, under General Perón's orders, Evita's body (she died of a particularly painful and malignant cancer in her early 30s, at the height of her hysterical adulation by Argentina's "shirtless ones") was beautifully embalmed by a skillful Spanish embalmer. He seems also to have made several copies of his masterwork; most of the action of the novel revolves around the attempts by Colonel Moori Koenig of Military Intelligence to identify the real corpse, then to dispose of it in such a way that Perónistas, who see it as a symbol of all they cherished about the eventually discredited regime, can't make symbolic use of it. In the process, he and his men become obsessed by the body's magically hypnotic qualities, and their lives are unalterably changed. It is all a long way from the easy sentimentality of the Broadway musical, but further evidence of the extraordinary grip that remarkable yet banal woman still seems to exert over the Argentine imagination. No American reader can expect fully to share that degree of involvement with the subject, but this is nonetheless a captivating study of how magic and politics sometimes surrealistically merge. 75,000 first printing; simultaneous Spanish version by Vintage Espanol. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Argentine writer Martinez's latest novel explores his country's obsession with the legacy of Eva Peron, populist wife of former dictator Juan Peron. Let no reader assume, however, that this is a straightforward, chronologically strict novel about Evita from humble origins to early death. Primarily, this is the odd history of Evita's mummified body after her untimely death from cancer in 1952 at age 33. When his wife died, General Peron insisted her body be preserved for posterity; after his ouster, the powers who succeeded him as leaders of the country feared the possible use of Evita's body as a tangible symbol around which Peron's supporters might rally. In telling this almost macabre story of who did what with Evita's body and when, which is accomplished in a mixed-media format--a blend of fiction and documentary, essay and memoir--the author ultimately establishes a full portrait of Evita, emphasizing her impact on Argentine history both in life and after. A complex, challenging novel that lovers of Latin American fiction will applaud. (Reviewed Aug. 1996)0679447040Brad Hooper

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina on July 16, 1934. He received an undergraduate degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the National University of Tucumán and a master's degree from the University of Paris. He was a novelist, journalist, essayist and critic. In the early 1970s, he conducted long interviews with Juan Domingo Perón in Madrid, where the general was living in exile.

In 1975, while eating lunch in a Buenos Aires restaurant, he received word that when he stepped outside, he would be assassinated by a right-wing paramilitary group. Since there was no back door, he decided to document his own murder and phoned his newspaper requesting a photographer. When a swarm of photographers descended, the assassins scattered. He fled the country and eventually ended up in the United States, where he taught at the University of Maryland in the mid-1980s.

His works include The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón), Santa Evita, and The Tango Singer (El Cantor de Tango). He taught at Rutgers University from 1995 until his death. He died as the result of a brain tumor on January 31, 2010 at the age of 75.

(Bowker Author Biography)