Steven E. Sanderson is not a big fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita.

“Not for me,” he says with a laugh, allowing that while the music is fine, those were “the most serious times” in Argentina, during the era when populist Juan Perón established his authoritarian rule.

He returns to that era (1954-2006) in his second novel, Epitaph of Sorrows, an engrossing blend of speculative historical fiction and magical realism. “The facts and personages of the Perón era are consistent with the historical record,” Sanderson writes. His protagonist, Dolores Rivas, is fictional, one of Argentina’s “invisible people,” and Sanderson employs her as a conveyance with which to observe the political instability, murder, and mayhem of the period.

Kirkus Reviews calls his book “a well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinean politics.”

Who was Dolores Rivas? According to her 30-year journal—which is shared by Andrés Carriego (also fictional), an outspoken critic of Perón—Rivas was abandoned to an orphanage in 1956 and spent a lifetime in search of her mother, who she is convinced is Nelida Haydee Rivas, Perón’s actual teenage mistress.

Sanderson has a solid foundation on which to re-create Argentina in that time period. Now retired and living on Skidaway Island just southeast of Savannah, Georgia, with his wife and dog, Sanderson was a specialist on Latin America for 35 years. He taught university courses in Latin American politics and history. “Argentina is a remarkable country,” he notes.

He became interested in Latin America 50 years ago when he worked for Sen. J. William Fulbright, who at the time was Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The overthrow of the former president of Chile was imminent,” Sanderson describes. “His election in 1970 caused a tremendous amount of skulduggery in Washington and in Santiago. I became interested in the hearings led by Sen. Frank Church into whether the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (ITT) had participated in destabilizing the Chilean government.” 

Sanderson attended Stanford University to start his graduate work. There, he met Richard Fagen, a professor of Latin American studies. “There had been a great outcry in the Latin American scholarly community, because universities had been closed and students, professors, and administrators were in danger for their lives. Richard helped to organize an effort for the most at-risk academics, to provide scholarships for them to come to the United States or Europe. I was swept up in it. I marveled at all the people I met and how interesting they were and how little I knew about what was going on there. Within weeks, I went into professor Fagen’s office and said I wanted to do my Ph.D. on a Latin American country. That’s where it started.”

Argentina’s story fascinated Sanderson. “[The country] has a deep tradition in fiction writing,” he says. “The other historical aspect is how it went from being one of the richest counties in the world in the 1910s to being a real mess economically in the 1960s. It is a story that weaves together a really powerful, well-educated elite and a kind of naked populism, which is personified in Perón. There were important and brave journalists who risked and often lost their lives writing open critiques of what was going on in the country. That is a proud tradition in Argentinean journalism that I taught about, and something I wanted to write about.” 

The character of Andrés Carriego represents that proud tradition. He shares Dolores’ story as something of a last hurrah as he is being hounded by “the ultranationalist right, the cartoonish Perónist remainders”: 

The journal Porvenir, ironically named for some prospective Argentine future, no longer exists, having been hounded out of existence by gangsters’ threats and the physical intimidation of its publisher, a fine man of letters who deserves better. I have written for several such magazines through the years, which in the grand tradition of Argentine literary and political magazines, flicker on and off like tiny stars in an implacable darkness. Porvenir has no future. Perhaps, Argentina shares that black fate.

Dolores’ story, though set against the backdrop of Argentina’s contemporary troubles, takes fanciful turns. Dolores describes shifts in time and inhabiting the spirit of Argentinean folkloric characters. At one point, she seems convinced that she is dead. 

“Dolores was an invisible person,” Sanderson says, “and in the course of the political instability and murder and mayhem, who would be more invisible than an orphan, an illegitimate child who’s not quite right?”

He compares her to Oskar, the German child outraged by the adults he sees around him in Hitler’s Germany in Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum. “He was a witness to WWII,” Sanderson says. “That he decides to stop growing is one of the great fictional devices. That book tells the story of ordinary people and how they have to make their way through those murderous streets. That was what I was trying to convey with these vignettes that centered on Dolores and her friends.”

Two creative challenges Sanderson faced, he says, were “writing in the voice of a woman in a way that seemed respectful and true to her and, secondly, to write about Buenos Aires in an era that has long since disappeared. I conducted research of period accounts, journals, newspapers, and maps to try and capture what it was like. I’ve been to Argentina any number of times, but it’s not the Argentina of the 1950s.”

It was also important to Sanderson to emphasize that Delores never saw herself as a victim. “She loved Perón,” he says, “and thought he was a great man. She never betrayed her love or her faith in him even though he gave her all the reasons to do exactly that. Many people with less emotional conviction would have rolled over, and she didn’t.”

Ultimately, why was Sanderson compelled to tell this story? “I’m really devoted to reading and writing fiction,” he says, and adds with a laugh, “and I’m retired; I’m not working. So I can devote my time to doing what I want as long as the chores get done.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.