Tomás Eloy Martínez: La novela de Perón (The Peron Novel)

John J. Junieles reviews Tomás Eloy Martínez' La novela de Perón (The Peron Novel).

La novela de Perón logra acercar al lector a ver de manera real y crítica la vida de un hombre que representó tanto para Argentina. El texto le propone al lector de una manera clara un juego en el cual él es también el protagonista de la misma, en cuanto es parte de la historia y resulta casi imposible excluirse de ese “ser parte”.

La verosimilitud es parte crucial de la narración, ya que a pesar de la gran cantidad de memorias y testimonios a los que se recurre, ningunojavascript:void(0) anula a otro a pesar de que se confronten. La narración es impecable y la división por capítulos (20 y un epílogo) le da entrada a diversas maneras de ver a la historia.

Tomás Eloy Martínez convierte un hecho que podría únicamente terminar siendo una mitificación eterna, en una realidad que desmitifica a un hombre que ha sido visto como un baluarte, y quizá eso es lo más importante del texto, ya que posiblemente le ha quitado de los hombros a la Argentina, y hasta al mismo Perón, un peso que ahora la deja caminar más tranquila, dejando el pasado atrás y mirando hacia un futuro prometedor. Definitivamente, ya no volverían a ser los mismos.

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Tomás Eloy Martínez

Ana Laura Lissardy remembers Tomás Eloy Martínez.

Conocí a Tomás Eloy en otoño, en un bar de una pequeña ciudad de luces tenues y carteles en inglés. Miraba hacia afuera y sus manos se unían a través de una taza de café humeante apoyada entre ellas. Lo vi desde la calle, mientras caminaba sin rumbo, y dudé de ese azar benévolo o distraído que nos cruzó. Pero era él, no había dudas. Lo delataban su mirada triste, de párpados caídos, y esas dos arrugas –ya canaletas– verticales en el entrecejo.

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Ariel Dorfman remembers Tomás Eloy Martínez.

Eran tiempos nefastos. Yo acababa de llegar de un Chile que le había prometido al mundo la revolución de Allende y nos había dado, en cambio, la asonada de Pinochet, y creo que se me notaba las muchas y recientes muertes, y Tomás lo entendió enseguida y me ofreció también de inmediato su cariño.

"Cualquier cosa que necesites", me dijo, y hallé en él una generosidad que nunca cesó hasta el día de su propia muerte. Me armaba reuniones en su casa con corresponsales holandeses y curas revolucionarios y montoneros esquivos y siempre bien regadas con vino y pasta y carnes.

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Tomás Eloy Martínez

Tomás Eloy Martínez passed away last Sunday January 31st. Martínez was one of the most famous contemporary Argentine authors.
Among his most notourious novels are The Memoirs of the General, Santa Evita, the Flight of the Queen and the The Tango Singer.




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Latin American Literature

Tomas Eloy Martinez: The Tango Singer

John Brzezinski reviews Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Tango Singer.




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Argentine Literature

Tomás Eloy Martínez - The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón)

In June 20, 1973, General Juan Domingo Peron returns to Argentina after eighteen years of exile.
He's accompanied by his wife Isabel and a large entourage. In Madrid he leaves years of disregard for General Franco's regime and the memory of a triumphant Eva Perón whose mummified body rests in he's own home. With him he takes some unfinished memories where he wants to give an image of Napoleon for himself.
More than two million people, the largest crowd ever assembled, waits for him at the airport. Meanwhile, his followers are fighting fiercely to get hold of the symbol that still represents the old General.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Alfaguara Prize in 2002, summarizes in this novel, full of action and characters from last century's Argentine history, through the biography of a man who embodied the hope of his people, while inquires the multiple faces of truth and the power fiction has to create bridges between them.



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Argentine Literature

Interview with Tomás Eloy Martínez

The novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez believes his career as one of Argentina's most prominent journalists imperilled him yet saved his life. Blacklisted by a paramilitary group in the 1970s for his job on a Buenos Aires newspaper, he ignored death threats, including a letter bomb at his home, until gunmen surrounded a fashionable restaurant where he was eating lunch. It chilled his blood, he recalls, "but I wanted people to have pictures of my killers". When he rang his paper to send a photographer, the receptionist said: "Why so modest? I'll send them all." Martínez is convinced that the bevy of cameras scared off the death squad.

He fled to Paris, taking refuge in the residence of Mexico's then ambassador, the novelist Carlos Fuentes. It was 1975, the year after the death in office of Argentina's populist dictator Juan Perón, and shortly before his reigning widow, his third wife Isabel, was overthrown by the military junta in 1976, ushering in the terror and disappearances known as the "dirty war". During 10 years of exile, Martínez moved from France to Venezuela and, in 1982, to the United States, where he became director of Latin American studies at Rutgers university in New Jersey. He is writer-in-residence there.

His imagination, however, remains rooted in his homeland. While he denounced the junta in Venezuelan newspapers, his three early novels were banned in Argentina, and republished there only after the return to democracy in 1983. The Perón Novel (1985), which riled the Peronistas, was a political satire centred on the dictator's return in 1973 from 18 years of exile, while its prequel, Santa Evita (1995), artfully deconstructed the myth of Perón's second wife, Eva Duarte - Evita. A peasant-turned-B-movie actor, Eva bewitched the president and the crowds alike. She died of cancer in 1952, aged only 33. The novel, which traces a macabre struggle over her embalmed corpse, was a bestseller in Argentina for more than a year, and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

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Argentine Literature

Alfaguara Prize 2007 Jury

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa will preside to the jury of the 10th edition of the Alfaguara Prize 2007. Like in previous editions, the composition of the rest of the jury will not become public until the award is announced.
From his first edition in 1998, outstanding writers have presided over the Jury of the Alfaguara Prize: Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Mendoza, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Jorge Semprún, Luis Mateo Ten, Jose Saramago, Manuel Caballero Bonald and Angeles Mastretta.
The Alfaguara Prize is one of the most important literary awards in Spanish language.
Previously awarded authors include, last year's winner Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo with Abril Rojo, Graciela Montes, Ema Wolf, Laura Restrepo, Xavier Velasco, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Elena Poniatowska, Clara Sánchez, Manuel Vicent.
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Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.

New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.

In "The Tango Singer," as in his two previous novels, "Santa Evita" and "The Perón Novel," Martínez's locale is Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martínez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the "atrocious dictatorship" in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in "Tango."

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living - in New Jersey.

New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" in 1955.

In "The Tango Singer," as in his two previous novels, "Santa Evita" and "The Perón Novel," Martínez's locale is Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martínez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the "atrocious dictatorship" in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in "Tango."

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In "The Tango Singer," as in his two previous novels, "Santa Evita" and "The Perón Novel," Martínez's locale is Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martínez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the "atrocious dictatorship" in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in "Tango."

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In his new novel, "The Tango Singer," Tomás Eloy Martínez ("The Péron Novel"), who was short-listed for the International Man Booker Prize, explores themes not unlike those found in tango music.

Bruno Cadogan, a New York academic, is writing a dissertation on the origins of tango. He hears of an extraordinary tango singer in Buenos Aires named Julio Martel, who is believed to be even more talented than the legendary Carlos Gardel, and journeys there to seek him out.

The year is 2001 and Argentina is undergoing an economic upheaval. Citizens have taken to the streets to protest unemployment. Crimes and betrayals are common. And Buenos Aires, once a majestic city compared to Paris and Madrid, has taken on a shabby appearance.

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

"The Tango Singer" is not for everyone. It's not entertainment in the accepted sense. It is, rather, a perplexing intellectual puzzle that demands a considerable backlog of knowledge and a mind that's willing to work overtime. It also helps to have a burning and respectful love of Buenos Aires -- its geography, population and history.

The author, Tomás Eloy Martínez, was born in Argentina but fled the country during the years of military rule. He teaches now in the United States, but much of his work has been in the form of devotions and meditations on his native city -- an effort to recapture a past that often has been disgraceful or slippery or both. His earlier books, "The Perón Novel" and the terrific "Santa Evita," conformed to this plan, and so does "The Tango Singer."

The narrator here is an impecunious graduate student from New York City, Bruno Cadogan, who's been working on "Jorge Luis Borges' essays on the origins of the tango." Cadogan feels that he's mired in trivia, "just filling page after futile page." Besides, he's never even been to Argentina, but he doesn't worry too much about that aspect of things. He's read so many books and seen so many films about the country that he has a strong (if imaginative) idea of it in his head. Another academic, far more learned than he, tells him about a legendary tango singer -- a mysterious artist who's never recorded a note and never announces his appearances in nightclubs -- Julio Martel, better even than the godlike singer Carlos Gardel, "to whom all voices belonged."

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

ON a dawn as beautiful as any since the world began, a young man watches the sun rise from the balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel. "There [had] never existed a city as beautiful as Buenos Aires at that moment," he reflects. Exalted by the glory of the moment, he goes to write a letter full of joy to a friend; instead he writes another letter, an act of unredeemable baseness.

The young man's name is Bruno. He is an American who has just written his PhD on Jorge Luis Borges's essays about the origins of the tango, a thesis he wrote without travelling to the city where it all began. So in September 2001, when Argentina is again threatening to dissolve into financial and physical anarchy, Bruno travels to Buenos Aires on a different quest. In his native New York he has heard about a fabled tango singer who has never recorded and doesn't give concerts but appears regularly at bizarre venues across the city. Julio Martel has a voice that threads the air like the shadow of an angel's wing and Bruno is obsessed with the need to hear him sing.

That obsession is the sketch from which this remarkable novel starts. In its finished form, it is a painting burning with life, dazzling with ideas; in essence it is an exploration of Walter Benjamin's theory of history. Tomas Eloy Martinez, director of Latin American studies at Rutgers University in the US, is not an instantly familiar name in the Latin American canon although he was short-listed for last year's International Man Booker Prize won by Ismail Kadare. Martinez, born in Argentina in 1934, is two years older than Kadare and, like the Albanian novelist, has spent much of his life exiled from his native country. This is his third novel to be translated into English.

This is a writer familiar with the nature of obsession. As an exile from Argentina, he cannot help but write about, inquire into and trace out some map of understanding for the violent and unpredictable history of a country that in the early decades of the 20th century had claims to greatness. One of those claims has to be the tango, which has come to define Argentina and, specifically, Buenos Aires.

You can find the review here

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Tomas Eloy Martinez' The Queen's Flight published in Romania

Carturesti Books will host tomorrow the launch of a book by Argentinean writer Tomas Eloy Martinez. "The Queen's Flight" is a novel about desire and power, the story of which takes place on the background of a political reality dominated by corruption and describes the love story between the manager of a newspaper in Buenos Aires and his protegee, a young and talented journalist.
According to the editors, the novel focuses on the game of obsession, which mixes sexuality and domination, a mystery about the mechanisms of political and mass media power, constructing a world in which corruption has infiltrated all domains.
Tomas Eloy Martinez, 72, is considered a classic Argentinean writer because of his two books "Novela de Peron," written in 1985, and "Santa Evita," written in 1995, which has been translated in over 30 countries. Besides novels, Eloy Martinez has also written short stories, essays and film scripts.

You can find the article here

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The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

A brief review of Tomas Eloy Martinez' The Tango Singer.

Tomas Eloy Martinez originally set out to write a book about Buenos Aires for Bloomsbury's "Writer in the City" series before his novelist's instincts took over. This explains why the Argentine capital is the real protagonist of The Tango Singer.
"I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third storey upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear," writes Bruno Cadogan, visiting the inflation-stricken city to research a thesis about Jorge Luis Borges' essays on tango.

You can find the full review here

Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com

Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

Madonna performed it in Evita. Sally Potter directed it in The Tango Lesson. Hundreds, mainly women of uncertain age, dance it across British cities. And the Argentines, who claim to have choreographed it - although the roots lie in the male partnerships of Cuban sailors improvising on the rhythms of the habañera - have written about it. Even Borges's brief "History of the Tango" opens by paying homage to the many histories that precede his. And British visitors to La Boca (the port where tango emerged) write glamorous accounts of their encounters.

Tomas Eloy Martinez takes a less glamorous approach. The novelist is interested in tango's myth and mystique, related through the lyrics rather than the movements of this lament that balances on a knife-edge between consummate control and intense passion. As with The Peron Novel and Santa Evita, The Tango Singer is about the Buenos Aires of his youth, before a right-wing bomb ousted Martinez from his newspaper and brought exile in the US.

The eponymous singer is Julio Martel, discovered by a North American PhD student during a chance conversation with the cultural historian Jean Franco. Again, this mingling of actual and fictitious protagonists belongs to a Latin American genre of "meta-historical fiction".

You can find the full review here

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The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

A review Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Tango Singer

Tomás Eloy Martínez, who was shortlisted for last year's inaugural International Man Booker Prize, was born in Argentina in 1934. His writing is satisfyingly sharp and eccentric. He casts Eva Perón as one of those women "whose lives were so excessive that, like the inconvenient facts of history, they were left without a real place of their own. Only in novels could they find the place they belonged, as always happens in Argentina to people who have the arrogance to exist too much."

But The Tango Singer is much more than a card-sharp's showy sleight of hand. Ultimately it's a testament to man's desire to transcend death. No one does it more eloquently than the tango singer himself. Martel's haunting performances, sung in seemingly unconnected locations all over Buenos Aires, follow the contours of a map. Read the map and the city's shameful past is revealed.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that a man fills the space around him with images of mountains, stars, kingdoms and people, only to discover shortly before his death that "the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face". Borges would have adored the tango singer's audacious map. And, given that Borges often reviewed books which were never written and profiled writers who never existed, I suspect he would have loved the fact that not only is this glittering homage to him a work of fiction, but it concludes with the words: "all the characters in this novel are imaginary, even those who seem real."

You can find the full review here

Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com

Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com