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Cursed by a Saint |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Barbara Mujica |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1997 |
| Size: 2,042 Words, 12,088 Characters |
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SANTA EVITA
Tomás Eloy Martinez, translated by Helen Lane
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996
371 pp., $23.00
Santa Evita has been on the best-seller list for months in Latin America and deserves to enjoy the same good fortune here. Tomás Eloy Martinez's perspicacious novel is not just another rehash of Eva Peron's rise from third-rate actress to the most powerful woman in Argentina but a thoughtful inquiry into how the Argentine masses came to revere her as though she were a saint.
Juan Domingo Peron was president of Argentina from 1946 until 1955, when a military revolt ended his rule. He was elected to office again in 1973. During his first presidency, Peron governed Argentina with an iron hand, using media censorship, violating citizens' civil rights, and bringing the judiciary and educational systems under party control. Peron's economic reform and social welfare programs won him the support of labor, however, and he rallied the poor--the descamisados, or shirtless ones--by fanning class hatred.
In 1945 he married Eva Duarte, the illegitimate daughter of a property-holding man and a poor provincial woman. Eva suffered the contempt of her father's legitimate famil...
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...ity that the author describes and from the slipperiness of the truth, which seems paradoxically to be both within reach and completely beyond our grasp.
Tomás Eloy Martinez has written a dark, yet illuminating book, as full of contradictions as the subject it explores. Santa Evita is a tour de force that deserves a readership as wide in this country as the one it achieved in Latin America.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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