Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934–2010)

This book, chillingly, doesn't feel untimely. It's a little too close to home in regards to a government leaning toward nationalism, fascism, gaslighting, etc.

The book deals with the reality, the unreality, the dreams (hoped for, crushed, never lost), the almost-unimaginable life around Argentina's Dirty War. There is a magical element here, but not really magical realism -- it is all too real to think that if your loved one was "disappeared", you would endlessly search, believe, hope that show more somehow, some way you would find your loved one again. If you do see them years later, is it a break with reality? Has the stress of decades caused hallucinations, alternate realities of the mind? Dementia? Or is it an against-all-odds reunion?

It's not an easy book to read or to follow. Partly it focuses on a woman whose husband becomes a "disappeared" soon after they are married. She never gives up hope, she never stops searching. But her trials are compounded by her family life as her father is a mouthpiece, the master of PR for the regime. She's torn between the harsh reality of knowing what her father does, what the regime does, but also not wanting to believe those truths of her father, not wanting to believe what happened to her husband, not wanting to know the things her country is doing. Her life is in this state of purgatory always. Another element comes into play partway through: the author (the real author or a fictitious version of the real author who himself lived in exile during the military dictatorship?) striking up a relationship/friendship with the main character, their histories overlapping as exiles from Argentina. Is the author telling her story? Is she telling her story to the author? Or is the author creating her reality? Her unreality? It's a bit of a mind-bending, post-modern style of storytelling & an effective way to delve some of the realities of this terrifying, alarming period of Argentine history & the long, murky shadows it has cast for decades.

Not an easy read stylistically or content-wise. But effective at creating the never-ending unease, fear, waiting, loss, anxiety, & societal amnesia that often surrounds the horrific, both on a personal & national level. show less

Perhaps the only sane approach to the insanity and cruelty of Argentina's Dirty War is to fade into a magical-realistic vision. Tomás Eloy Martínez does just that in Purgatory. In the story of a woman who searches for thirty years for her husband who was disappeared, he invites the reader to share the fear, despair, and helplessness of the survivor. I know nothing about the Dirty War other than what I have read in this book. Even with my faulty understanding of what Eloy Martínez was show more doing, I think that I know enough.
Purgatory wanders through time with both a third person narration that seemed clumsily translated and a first person narration that is immediate and deft. Emilia, the main character, is sixty when she sees her husband, still looking the thirty years that he was when he disappeared, in a restaurant in New Jersey, far from their Argentinian homeland. The couple had been cartographers sent on assignment into the wilds to make a valid map for their company. They stumble onto a crowd of homeless people, rounded up by the milita and dumped in the wilderness (in one of the most distressing scenes in the book) with no means of sustenance. When they try to report them, they are arrested. Because Emilia's father is a central power behind the government, she is saved. Simón, however, disappears. Emilia spends her life looking for him and drawing maps by which they may find their way to one another.
Maps and disappearances are the controlling motifs of the book. For Emilia a map has a separate reality which one may enter. In some sense everybody in the book disappears. Emilia and her professor friend, the first person narrator who is or is not TEM, have disappeared in exile. Emilia's mother disappears in dementia. Her cruel, callous father finally disappears in death. The Argentina that Emilia and her friends love disappears in illusion. This being present and not present is the essence of Purgatory.
Hear a conversation between Emilia and Simón:
"'I've been looking for this island for a long time,' he says. 'I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that's my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.'
'It must be situated in time, then,' Emilia says, 'and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.'"
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It will bear rereading, especially for somebody like me who understood only a small portion of what she read. show less

Purgatory is the first novel of Tomás Eloy Martínez to be translated into English since his death in 2010. He is best know for his acclaimed books The Peron Novel, Santa Evita, and The Tango Singer. It is translated from the Spanish by award winning translator Frank Wynne.

This was my first novel by Eloy Martínez, so I had nothing but his reputation to go on but I am always willing to try new authors from Latin America. This one did not let me down. It’s a hauntingly melancholy novel show more about a woman whose husband disappeared thirty years ago along with thousands of others during Argentina’s military dictatorship. She spends the intervening time searching for him as she hears rumors that he has been seen in various places. What makes the book so poignant is that her own father is a high ranking official in the dictatorship and is almost certainly complicit in his son-in-law’s fate and certainly in that of many of his compatriots. Eloy Martínez really does a great job of portraying how a people can put their blinders on and ignore that what they are doing really does not (and cannot) justify the end. As the novel jumps back and forth between the past and the present, you see the toll that this takes on the family and the country.

When Emilia finally sees her husband Símon in a restaurant, he has not aged a bit from the day he disappeared while she, of course, is 30 years older. As the novel winds on, Emilia withdraws into her “life” with Símon. Is it reality or is it all in her mind? You decide…but you should read this book.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage from the book:

“I thought about all the things that disappear without our even noticing, because we know only what exists, we know nothing of those things that never come into existence; I thought about the non-being I would have been had my parents conceived me seconds earlier or later. I thought of the libraries of books never written (Borges tried to make up for this absence in ‘The Library of Babel’), but all that remained was the idea, there was no flesh, no bones, a magnificent lifeless idea. I thought about the Mozart symphonies silenced by his untimely death, about the song running through John Lennon’s mind that December night when he was murdered. If we could recover the unwritten books, the lost music, if we could set out in search of what never existed and find it, then we should have conquered death.”

This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviews (sorry it wasn't really "early") show less

An exploration of the legacy of Argentina's Dirty War, this is a tremendous book.

It opens with an incredible first sentence and it contains a brilliant set piece involving Orsen Welles, but it does slow down from time to time. It is well worth pushing through, because this is a special work. For me, the difficulty was with the main character, Emilia, who is confusing and hard to understand. She frequently seems passive or obtuse despite her obvious intelligence and drive. But as the novel show more unfolds, the source of her character becomes clear. She is revealed in the end as the victim not just of her husband's disappearance but also of her powerful father's domination and control. She is an obvious stand-in for Argentina itself, deceived and brutalized, and part of the book's brilliance is that by the end the cause of her suffering and mental unravelling is so understandable.

It is a novel about dreams and illusions, good and bad. The disappearances and loss that lie at the center of the novel are not just the loss of things that existed, but also the absence of the things that never were. Dreams, maps, boundaries and writing are all metaphors for ways we both lose our way and try to find ourselves.

In our rather feckless time, where first novels about college baseball players are elevated to "best of the year" status, this book stands out. It is difficult, serious and important. The author died before this was translated into English, but it proudly speaks for him. I hope people read this book. show less