Today's paper brought the sad news that yesterday Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez passed away at the age of 75. Most famed for his fictionalized journalism books about Evita and Juan Domingo Perón, Eloy lead a liv\fe that took him from Argentina into exile in Venezuela and then to the U.S. to run the Latin American Studies program at Rutgers University. I only read one of his novels, Santa Evita, a truly amazing re-imagining of Evita's death and the long peregrination her body took after death before returning, years later, to Argentina. I can't say it showed me "what it was like" to be in Argentina then, but it contained a clear ring of truth (even though it was fiction). It tells the story in an engaging novelistic form intermixed with first person commentary from the investigator/writer/Eloy Martínez. Read it in Spanish if you can: the language is straightforward and contemporary (he's no Cortázar) and is worth the effort.

A sad day for Argentine letters.