Book description
Purgatorio is Martinez's most moving, most autobiographical novel and
yet it is also a ghost story, the ghost story which has been Argentina's
history since 1973. It begins, 'Simon Cardoso had been dead for thirty
years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining
room of Trudy Tuesday.' Simon, a cartographer like Emilia, had vanished
during one of their trips to map an uncharted country road. Later
testimonies had confirmed that he had been one of the thousands of
victims of the military regime - arrested, tortured and executed for
being a "subversive." Yet Emilia had refused to believe this
account, and had spent her entire life waiting for him to reappear. Now
in her sixties, the Simon she has found is identical to the man she lost
three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martinez
masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history -both personal and
political. Just as Simon's disappearance comes to represent the
thousands of disappearances that became such a common occurrence during
the dictatorship, so Emilia's refusal to accept his death mirror's the
country's unwillingness to face its reality. Praise for The Tango
Singer 'At times reminiscent of Paul Auster, The Tango Singer has the
makings of a satisfying thriller' Daily Telegraph 'One of Latin
America's most celebrated contemporary writers ... The Tango Singer is a
work of hallucinatory brilliance' Guardian 'Gloriously mysterious ... a
rich and delicious experience ... His writing is satisfyingly sharp and
eccentric' Independent on Sunday Tomas Eloy Martinez was born in
Argentina in 1934. During the military dictatorship, he lived in exile
in Venezuela where he wrote his first three books, all of which were
republished in Argentina in 1983, in the first months of democracy. He
was until his death in January 2010 a professor and director of the
Latin American Program at Rutgers University. He was shortlisted for the
2005 International Man Booker Prize.
