Purgatory
A Novel
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ISBN10: 1608197115
ISBN13: 9781608197118
Paperback
288 Pages
$17.00
CA$18.00
Simón 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 Tomás Eloy Martínez. 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 Simón, no time at all has passed. In Martínez'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.
Reviews
Praise for Purgatory
"A brilliant image of national psychosis. Vividly written."—New York Times Book Review
"One of Latin America's most celebrated contemporary writers."—The Guardian (UK)
"In Highland Park, NJ, Emilia Dupuy spots her husband, Simón Cardoso, who has been dead 30 years, wearing the same clothes, looking 30 years younger than he should be, and even toting the same leather bag he carried when he was allegedly murdered in Tucumán, Argentina, by government forces. Despite eyewitness accounts of his murder, Emilia has waited for her husband to return, the very definition of purgatory as a 'wait whose end we cannot know.' The author soon intervenes directly, purporting to tell Emilia's story firsthand as a narrator. Between the initial encounter and the final explanation, Martínez fills the pages with the saga of Emilia's family—her marriage and career, her mother's insanity, her father's collusion with the authoritarian government, her loyalty to her sister—while blending fiction and history. Unlike other novels that deal with the 'disappeared' during Argentina's Dirty War, however, Martínez glosses over the details of the atrocities and focuses instead on the historical implications of the era."—Lawrence Olszewski, Library Journal
"In this haunting and surreal depiction of the military dictatorship that gripped Argentina in the late 1970s after the death of Juan Peron, Martínez 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, Simón, whom she was sure 'had been dead thirty years' at the hands of military officials (and, she suspects, on the orders of her father). Simón 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 Simón together with the week of their beguiling reunion. Martínez 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."—Publishers Weekly