"As you said, it's a novel," I explained. "In novels, what is true is also false. Authors rebuild at night the same myths they've destroyed in the morning."
It never occurred to me that a novel about the corpse of Evita Peron would be such an entertaining read, full of humor and a playful approach to both writing and the stuff of which myths are made. Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez walks a very fine line between fact and fiction as it details the wandering of the corpse and copies of the corpse of the B-movie actress turned wife of Argentine dictator who was viewed as both whore and saint by those that sought to possess her on a variety of levels.
Love the quote above from near the end of the book because of it's obvious truth in regards to craft and an even more significant truth in regards to Eva Peron - she was written, created both by her own ingenuity and the cult followers that surrounded her in life and death. Her corporeal existence resonates throughout the book but is ultimately insignificant. Her often copied hair color and styling, her scent in life and death, her mannerisms, her fashion sense - all repeatedly remind but fail those who wished to capture her elusive essence. Martinez's skilled and hilarious treatment of the many foiled attempts surprised and delighted me especially in my laugh out loud moment of reading about the moon landing. (You have to read it!)
When one thinks of this type of cult of personality, it is usually centered upon a male leader. To Martinez's credit here, he is very sensitive to the fact that the voice he is trying to capture as he describes Eva and her history is unlike the fellow dictators with whom Peron shared the spotlight. At first he hints at questions he is unable to answer as to character and motivation. He avoids assigning his sympathies or approval to machismo views of the deceased. But then emerge explicit instances in which Martinez acknowledges a difficult to bridge divide between genders, my favorite of which occurs near the end when trying to capture the words of Eva's mother.
"It was not the same. It was almost the opposite. Without the mother's voice, without her pauses, without her way of looking at the story, the words no longer meant anything. I have seldom fought as hard against bringing into being a text that cried out to be narrated in the feminine as, meanwhile, I cruelly insisted on contorting its nature. Nor have I ever failed as miserably. It took me a long time to accept the fact that only when the mother's voice made me give in was there a story. I allowed her to speak, then, through me. And only in that way did I hear myself write."
All of the meta elements of the novel worked well for me but I just loved this admission of the contortion of nature for this particular story as it syncs so perfectly with all the male attempts to contort the nature and physical existence of Eva Peron to a product of their own design. This is in no way an endorsement of the very charismatic woman but an intense interest in how she came to influence in such a male dominated world. How she wrote herself is ultimately the point of fixation for many to this day, no one else's story has the ring of authenticity that Martinez delves into above in regards to her mother's voice. Without that indescribable something that Eva possessed, other's creations or stories of her become something akin to the Colonel's lying to himself without knowing he was lying.
"He had invented a reality, and within it he was God. He imitated God's imagination, and in that virtual kingdom, in that nothingness that was full only of itself, he believed himself to be invulnerable, invincible, omnipotent."
But of course this was illusion, imitation like the act of writing can sometimes be. The thing that is original, the thing that survives is the topic of this book. All other elements are humorous in their attempts to copy. Super yummy book. Flew through it.