The Perón Novel

Tomás Eloy Martínez

Pantheon Books, 1988 - Biographical fiction - 357 pages

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Santa Evita comes a dazzling fictional portrait of Juan Peron, the most revered -- and hated -- dictator in the history of Argentina. Following the ailing general from his return to his homeland after eighteen years of exile to his death scarcely a year later, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a novel whose fantasy only heightens its humanity. For in The Peron Novel the mask of history is lifted to reveal a tragically hollow man who was born a follower until the moment he found himself transformed into a leader. The result is a tour de force, the most audacious and compelling meditation on absolute power since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. -- Publisher description.

Contents

• Goodbye Madrid: 3
• Arcas Crew: 17
• Photographs of the Witnesses: 30

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Perón Novel
• Author: Tomás Eloy Martínez
• Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1988
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Aug 12, 2008
• ISBN: 0394558383, 9780394558387
• Length: 357 pages