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Frank Wynne

Purgatory Paperback – 1 December 2011

by Tomas Eloy Martinez (Author), Frank Wynne (Translator)

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Simon Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday. So begins Purgatory, the final and perhaps most personal work of the great Latin American novelist Tomas Eloy Martinez. Emilia Dupuy's husband vanished in the 1970s, while the two were mapping an Argentine country road. All evidence seemed to confirm that he was among the thousands disappeared by the military regime. Yet Emilia never stopped believing that the disappeared man would reappear. And then he does, in New Jersey. And for Simon, no time at all has passed. In Martinez's hands, this love story and ghost story becomes a masterful allegory for history political and personal, and for a country's inability to integrate its past with its present.

Praise for Santa Evita

"Brilliant...Affirms his place among Latin America's best writers."-New York Times

"Here is the novel that I have always wanted to read."-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"A beautiful book, a miracle."-Carlos Fuentes

"A master novel...I got choked up, I suffered, I enjoyed."-Mario Vargas Llosa

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Product details

ASIN : 1608197115
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (1 December 2011)
Language : English
Paperback : 273 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781608197118
ISBN-13 : 978-1608197118
Dimensions : 14.17 x 2.05 x 21.03 cm

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4 ratings

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About the Author

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.

Frank Wynne has translated numerous books from both French and Spanish into English, including the work of Michel Houellebecq, Marcelo Figueras, and Jules Verne. His accolades as a translator include the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Festival Prize.

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Paul Walter

Chimeras walk among us

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 February 2021

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Between 1976 and 1983 the military junta in Argentina murdered 30,000 and imprisioned 12,000 of its own citizens many of whom simply were disappeared. The regime collaborated in the CIA founded operation Condor with other South American states to pursue dissidents across borders. In desperation at the failure of their neo-liberal economics and popular discontent, the regime launched the Falklands / Malvinas invasion, its failure led to the fall of dictatorship.

The disappearances and imprisonment of 1.5% of the population put families in purgatory, the title is apt.

Martinez grapples with this tsunami of grief and dislocation through the eyes of exiled Emilia seeing her husband somehow alive in a New York diner 30 years after his death. Their love story is the kaleidescope illustrating the enormity of the times referencing actual events with surrealist skill. I have seen a comment that Martinez is cold and impersonal about Emila and Simon's relationship but I think this unfair. Emila's wedding night may have been a disaster but her honeymoon was joyful, the escape from her parents tyranny but cut short another more terrible.

Frank Wynne's translation is excellent sustaining the Martinez' lyricism. Do not be put off by the political backdrop or the surrealism. The themes are absolutely contemporary of love and loss, exile and the consequences of oppression.

Carolina de Robertis novel Perla is a surreal first person love story with a disappeared partner which I highly recommend as a companion read. Sheila Cassidy, Audacity to Believe is also highly recommended. Her autobiography of the period she was a christian nurse to the poor in Chile is a beacon of courage, love and caring in terrible circumstances.

M. L. Habel

(The only person who liked the book in our book club was the person ...

Reviewed in the United States on 19 August 2015

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A weird book - very surrealistic and hard to follow at times. I wouldn't read this is if wasn't a book club selection. (The only person who liked the book in our book club was the person who suggested it.) However, Martinez is a very famous author and perhaps the book was beyond me. If I had the chance to write a book about the terrible events in Argentina, I would have developed the story quite differently.

Rags

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on 20 August 2015

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A very hard and confusing read.

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