Purgatory

Simón Cardoso has been dead for thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, finds him in a New Jersey diner. Testimonies confirmed that Simón had been one of the thousands of victims of Argentina's military regime, executed for being a 'subversive'; yet this man is identical to the man she lost three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martínez masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history - both personal and political. And just as Simón's disappearance comes to represent the thousands of disappearances that were such a common occurrence during the dictatorship, so Emilia's refusal to accept his death mirrors the country's unwillingness to face its reality. The final work of the late Martínez, Purgatory is his most moving, most autobiographical novel.

This is a ghost story unlike any other; in fact, 'ghost story' is entirely inadequate a description for this densely woven, occasionally cryptic, occasionally virtuosic novel ... Thomas Eloy Martinez was hailed on his death in 2010 as one of Argentina's most innovative writers. Recalling Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Auster, this novel - elusive and resonant, satirical, surreal and moving - seems a fitting last testament, Limpidly translated by Frank Wynne ... a compassionate novel about the power of chimeras - of what we chose to see, of what we can bear to see - and the way grief clots when it is unsolved, The posthumous publication of Purgatory shows a writer at the height of his craft, and is a fitting conclusion to the work of one of Latin America's most remarkable novelists, [A] moving exploration of the intangible nature of truth, [A] haunting and surreal depiction of the military dictatorship that gripped Argentina in the late 1970s ... Martinez 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

Tomás Eloy Martínez 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. He died in 2010.