Naipaul's mid-1970s view of Argentina

[brief opinions from V. S. Naipaul's The Return of Eva Perón, André Deutsch Limited, 1980]

Argentina political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crises and deaths, but life is only cyclical, and the year always ends as it begins.

cabecita negra, the "blackhead," the man from the interior

For [Eva Perón] the Argentine aristocracy was always mediocre. . . . she shattered the myth of Argentina as an aristocratic colonial land. And no other myth, no other idea of the land, has been found to take its place.

the bitter Perón years, when [Borges] was "promoted" out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets, and resigned.

[Perón] was the army man who had moved out of the code of his caste and shaken up the old colonial agriculture society of Argentina . . . given a brutal face to the brutish land of estancias and polo and brothels and very cheap servants.

Argentina is a land of plunder.

a country where rhetoric hasn't ever been open and intellectual resources are scant . . . the country has yet no idea of itself . . . no real history

[Perón] brought out and made strident the immigrant proletarian reality . . . He showed the country its unacknowledged half-Indian face

Land in Argentina . . . is still only a commodity.

You can live in Argentina, many Argentines say, only if you can leave.

History in Argentina . . . is a process of forgetting.

For more than thirty years Argentina has been in a state of insurrection. . . . The parallel is with Haiti, after the slave rebellion of Toussaint

the Recoleta Cemetery, the upper-class necropolis of Buenos Aires. The stone and marble avenues of the mimic town are full of the great names of Argentina, or names which if the country had been better built, would have been great, but can be seen now only as part of a pretentious, failed past.