The story of Eva Perón's ascent from a childhood spent in the slums of Argentina to her fame as a prominent B-movie actress—and final position as the most powerful woman in the nation—is one of the more dramatic, not to mention bizarre, stories of the 20th century. It is not, however, the primary focus of this remarkable, fact-based novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez. Alternating between the first-person story of the author's own search for the truth and a more traditional novelistic narration, Martinez instead tells the story of the post-mortem misadventures and convoluted conspiracies in which Perón's body found itself involved after her death. Preserved to near-perfection, her body (and the numerous copies of it) becomes the object of intrigue for the various parties seeking to control Argentina after her husband's downfall. A floating signifier, ambiguously iconic even in death, the body comes to assume diverse, most often perverse, meanings for each person who seeks to possess it—the author, a lifelong anti-Peronist, not excluded. Throughout it all, Martinez weaves a hauntingly melancholy strand about the impossibility of writing history and the impossibility of escaping it. An extraordinary work in its own right, Santa Evita is also an advance antidote to the already building tide of Evitamania set to peak with the release of the film version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
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