Tomas Eloy Martinez: imagining the truth.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

In a magical mix of fact and fiction, this veteran novelist reveals the historical and psychological realities of his native Argentina

"Nothing is true, at the same time everything is true," says Argentine novelist Tomas Eloy Martinez. "You see, in my part of the world, documents often were falsified by governments. There is almost nothing authentic. This was true during the Islas Malvinas dispute with England: A completely false history based on propaganda was generated as a pretext to pursue a war. The same is true during the so-called dirty war, and generally that principle is basic throughout my country's history. History is written by those in power. Thus, if those in power have the right to imagine a history that is false, why then shouldn't novelists attempt with their imaginations to discover the truth? That is the challenge."

And it is a challenge that he has more than met. During the last two years, Eloy's latest work, Santa Evita, which tracks the bizarre peregrinations of the corpse of Eva Duarte de Peron, has met with spectacular critical and commercial success. Selling 1.2 million copies worldwide in thirty-six languages, the novel has established its author as yet another important voice in Latin American literature. Among literary cognoscenti, at least, Eloy is not a newcomer but a much-admired veteran journalist and novelist who belongs to the region's literary inner circle and counts as close friends giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Augusto Roa Bastos.

In 1985 Eloy Martinez produced his first novel on the Peron era, La novela Peron [The Peron Novel], which deals with Juan Peron's rise to power in the forties and fifties and his return to Argentina in 1973. Taken together the two books obsessively scrutinize this period in Argentine history, notable for the body of false history it produced. By drawing upon years of research and employing techniques associated with journalism, Eloy creates a heightened sense of reality by imagining what the truth might have been. On one level, Santa Evita is also a meditation on truth.

Eloy believes that La novela Peron and Santa Evita are much more authentic than any traditional historical treatments of mid-twentieth-century Argentina. "This is also true of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's great nineteenth-century study of caudillismo, Facundo, o Civilizacion y barbarie [Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism], which the future Argentine president wrote while in exile in Chile," Eloy explains. "Although he had no access to pertinent documents, he was able to imagine a country, a history, a political ideal using language that is so strong and powerful that the real Facundo Quiroga emerges."

Eloy grew up with ties to journalism. His uncle was a major stockholder in the newspaper La Gaceta, in Tucuman, where the writer was born in 1934. That Eloy would someday direct La Gaceta, Argentina's largest newspaper outside the capital, was something of a family expectation from the outset, but as a boy he dreamed of writing literature. "Quite by chance, I wrote my first story at age seven," Eloy recalls. "After school, what was to be ten minutes watching just one attraction at a traveling circus stretched into three hours. My worried parents, who had called the police and hospital, didn't excuse me when I got home and explained what had happened. As punishment, they prohibited me from doing what I liked best: going to movies and reading books, which is to say they prohibited my imagination. I was obliged to dream by means of writing. I collected postage stamps, so I wrote a story about a fantastic adventure that occurred when I entered a stamp from Mozambique, which bore the image of a jungle full of monkeys. My folks were surprised by the story and immediately lifted the prohibition."

As a young teenager, Eloy published short stories in La Gaceta, including a tale about a priest angry with God and an account of a woman who cares for the cadaver of her deceased husband. "These proved to be themes that would engage me all my life; it's amazing how early they revealed, themselves!" By age fifteen he won a poetry prize for the province of Tucuman. "At the university, I studied law to please my parents but didn't do well in my classes until my father finally came to appreciate my passion for literature and authorized a transfer to the School of Letters. I also worked at the newspaper as a writer of headlines for stories from the international news...