Purgatory
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Purgatorio is Martínez'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, 'Simón Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday.' Simón, 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 Simón she has found is identical to the man she lost three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martínez masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history -both personal and political. Just as Simón'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this haunting and surreal depiction of the military dictatorship that gripped Argentina in the late 1970s after the death of Juan Peron, Mart nez (1934 2010) explores the devastation of those left behind when their loved ones "disappeared" in the Dirty War. The story is told through the lens of cartographer Emilia Dupuy, the daughter of a high-ranking adviser during the military junta. Now 60 years old and living in New Jersey, Emilia one day sees her husband, Sim n, who she was sure "had been dead thirty years" at the hands of military officials (and, she suspects, on the orders of her father). Sim n looks exactly as he did 30 years earlier, "had not aged a day," and still loves Emilia. She takes him back to her apartment where they reconnect, and then she goes away with him, alarming her friends. Told from the perspective of a New Jersey writer and professor to whom Emilia has told her tale, the novel weaves Emilia's life without Sim n together with the week of their beguiling reunion. Mart nez (The Tango Singer) questions the ideas of identity, geography, existence, and reality with fluid prose and finely detailed imagery that throws into relief the brutality and fear of this dark era.
