Challenging grim reality

Purgatory

“SIMÓN CARDOSO had been dead for 30 years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday.”

With this beguiling opening sentence, the late Argentinian novelist, Tomás Eloy Martinez, sets in motion a story that challenges the very foundations of reality. The result is a ghost story of sorts, but leagues advanced from the traditional type. It is also a social commentary, a soul-history, an allegory of a nation’s worst excess and most terrible secret. Perhaps more than anything else, though, it is a love story, a deep consideration of the heart’s most empowering emotion and just how long it can be expected to nourish.