Santa Evita - Livro de bolso

Eva Peron entered immortality on 26th July, 1952. The bizarre after-life of her embalmed body - hidden, hijacked, replicated, smuggled abroad, buried, resurrected, repatriated - echoed her equally strange life. From the story of the plain poor-trash girl who reinvented herself to become first the uncrowned queen of Argentina's masses and then their uncanonized saint, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a mesmerizing, highly readable work of fiction., Among the great corpses of our age are Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Stalin. Mao, at least, is still on view for the masses to see, some two decades after his demise. But no corpse engendered as much intrigue as that of Eva Peron. Elevated to near sainthood in Argentina after her death in 1952, her perfectly preserved corpse was seized by the Argentine Army following the ouster of her husband in 1955. By then her corpse had acquired the status of a sacred relic, and while army officials wanted to keep it out of the hands of Peronists, they were loath to destroy the corpse for fear of the backlash that might follow. Tomas Eloy Martinez has reassembled the story of the corpse of Eve Peron in Santa Evita, and in the process, produced a riveting, rich book that not only tells the tale of one of the more bizarre sagas in the history of South American politics, but that also gets to the heart of the age-old human impulse to create myths and tell stories.