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Imagining Argentina is a 2003 drama historical film written and directed by British playwright Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas, Emma Thompson, Leticia Dolera and Rubén Blades. It is based on the award-winning eponymous 1987 novel by American writer Lawrence Thornton.
Apr 21, 2004 · The political and the paranormal make uneasy bedfellows in Christopher Hampton's Imagining Argentina, based on Lawrence Thornton's award-winning novel. The story's set during the 'dirty...
Imagining Argentina (1987) is a novel by American author Lawrence Thornton, about the Dirty War in 1970s Argentina, during which the military government abducted and "disappeared" suspected opposition activists. It was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Takes Place
- The Novel in Focus
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Was Written
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A century of chaos
From 1930 to 1983, Argentines lived in a continual state of political instability. The army’s 1930 overthrow of President Hipólito Yrigoyen set a pattern that was to be repeated incessantly throughout the following decades. Leaders replaced one another sometimes as often as every few months, and elections, if held, were as likely to be fixed as fair. In 1946, in a rare, relatively clean election, army colonel Juan Perón was elected; his stint in office would last nearly ten years. His second...
Fake war, real violence
Juan Perón spent most of those intervening years in exile, but returned in 1971 and won Argentina’s 1973 presidential election. Unfortunately the aged Perón died the following year, and presidential duties were taken over by his third wife, Maria Estela “Isabel” Perón. During her reign, terrorist activity increased. In March 1976, she was forced out of power by a group of Argentine generals. Justifying their takeover as an attempt to rescue Argentina from impending civil war, the generals qui...
A PHONY BATTLE
A common practice of the Argentine military during the dirty war was to stage phony battles between their forces and communist rebels. One former U.S. intelligence agent tells the story of “having arrived at the scene of a supposed ’shoot-out’ between the security forces and leftist guerrillas in 1976 to find the former splashing chickens’ blood around the locale before admitting local reporters and photographers” (Andersen, p. 3).
The plot
Carlos Rueda’s life as playwright for a children’s theater in Buenos Airesis suddenly interrupted one afternoon when his wife, Cecilia, disappears. A journalist, Cecilia has written one too many editorials critical of Argentina’s military government; her husband and daughter, Teresa, assume that she has been taken on the orders of government officials. Soon after Cecilia’s abduction, Carlos discovers that he has a strange new ability: after hearing the stories of other desaparecidos from thei...
A WORD ABOUT LATIN AMERICAN FICTION
In an essay called “Latin America: Fiction and Reality,” the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Latin Americans have a hard time differentiating between fiction and reality, and this difficulty can be traced to the days of Spanish colonization. Because novels were forbidden in the Spanish colonies of Latin Americaby the strict Spanish Inquisition, the natural human “appetite for lies” emerged in other parts of life. As Vargas Llosa explains, “the inquisitors achieved the exact opp...
The uses of imagination
Imagining Argentinatells the story of a government that has taken control of almost everything in the country, even deciding what constitutes truth. One of the only things beyond its reach is the imagination of its citizens. For the “disappeared” characters in the novel, imagination provides an escape from the nightmare of torture, as it had for the Sternbergs during the Holocaust. For Carlos Rueda, however, imagination assumes even greater meaning. It is both an escape from a painful reality...
A final injustice
Economic trouble and a failed attempt to win back control of the British-held Malvinas (Falkland) Islands finally ended the rule of the generals in 1983. Sensing their loss of any popular support—their lies had become less credible after the lost war with Britain—and their inability to solve the economic problems brought on by high military spending and financial mismanagement, the generals yielded power to civilians, scheduling a presidential election for October 1983. A month before their p...
Reception
Imagining Argentinawon numerous book awards and received praise from reviewers for its powerful storytelling and effective blending of the supernatural with the realistic—a style known as “magical realism,” popular among Latin American writers. It inspired a number of screenplays and a flamenco production called “Garden of Names.” Criticism of the novel focused on its unconvincing portrayal of Argentina, noting signs of Thornton’s unfamiliarity with the look and feel of Buenos Aires and the p...
Andersen, Martin Edwin. Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War.”Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993. Hodges, Donald C. Argentina’s “Dirty War”: An Intellectual Biography.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 199...
Imagining Argentina (1987) is a fantasy novel by American author Lawrence Thornton. Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War, Imagining Argentina centers Carlos Rueda, a Buenos Aires native whose supernatural abilities grant him insight into the fates of Argentina’s disappeared.
Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton is the strange yet, intriguing story of a man named Carlos Rueda. Carlos has the incredible ability of being able to see the fates of those who have been taken by Argentina’s government through vivid visions.
Although the story is contrived and unlikely, it pours an elixir of humanity over terrible times, during which a nation, renowned for its artistic credibility, was subjected to senseless acts of tyranny.
