The Peron Novel

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Santa Evita comes a dazzling fictional portrait of Juan Peron, the most revered -- and hated -- dictator in the history of Argentina. Following the ailing general from his return to his homeland after eighteen years of exile to his death scarcely a year later, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a novel whose fantasy only heightens its humanity. For in The Peron Novel the mask of history is lifted to reveal a tragically hollow man who was born a follower until the moment he found himself transformed into a leader. The result is a tour de force, the most audacious and compelling meditation on absolute power since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Tomas Eloy Martinez was born in 1934 in Argentina. 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. During a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for International Scholars, Martinez wrote The Peron Novel, which was published in 1988. He died in 2010.