A Thousand Deaths Plus One
Clothbound, sewn, jacketed, 296 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 2009, 0-929701-87-9 / 978-0-929701-87-5
Translated from the Spanish by Leland H. Chambers.
FINALIST: 2009 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD -- FICTION IN TRANSLATION
In 1987, while on a state visit to Warsaw, the author happened upon an exhibition of remarkable works by a hitherto unknown Nicaraguan photographer, Juan Castellón, who plied his craft in Europe between roughly 1880 and 1940. This improbable discovery launches Ramirez on a consuming quest to reveal the forgotten artist's identity -- an obsession that eventually takes him from Nicaragua to Vienna to Mallorca, and leads him to sift through the evidentiary remains of a raffish entourage of European and Latin American madmen, nobles, adventurers, and poets. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, Castellón tells his own side of the story, from his fantastic conception in Nicaragua, to an education in France courtesy of Napoleon III, to nights of debauchery in the company of his compatriot-in-exile Rubén Darío, to a final and unexpected residence in a Nazi concentration camp. A Thousand Deaths Plus One is a coruscating novel that recapitulates, in the biographical snapshots of an exceptionally ordinary man, the elusive history of an exceptionally unfortunate country.
"With this compulsive masterpiece, Sergio Ramírez will enchant American readers as he has been delighting us in the Spanish-speaking world for many years. Through the quest for an elusive photographer, Ramírez reveals and celebrates the history of Nicaragua, but indeed of the whole Western world in the last two centuries, and does so in ways that are as entertaining as they are profound." — Ariel Dorfman
See below to download a sample chapter or to read more reviews of the book.
"This dazzling novel allows English-speaking readers to discover what others have known for years: that Sergio Ramírez is one of the world's most imaginative and gifted storytellers. Leaping across cultures, continents and centuries, populated by figures from Turgenev to Queen Victoria to a bird named Pericles, A Thousand Deaths Plus One pulls readers into a phantasmagorical world as vivid as any ever created by a Latin American writer."— Stephen Kinzer, author of Blood of Brothers
"In order to appreciate . . . this labyrinth of voices, and find the way out . . ., you cannot listen to the voices in isolation, but you must realize that, as in a concert, all the voices constitute a single voice. Within the micro dialogues, you have to uncover the larger dialogue, the whole story, told with irony, a good dose of humor, and excellent handling of style."—Isolda Rodrìguez Rosales
"I believe he [writes] because reality seems like fiction to him and he prefers to make fiction from reality."—Lourdes Durán, El Diario de Mallorca [Note: Lourdes Durán appears as a character in the novel.]
"[In A Thousand Deaths Plus One] the playful juxtapositions of reality with literature cause one to ask: This whole great story, is it invented or is it real? The characters, did they exist or not? Surely both things are true, according to a dialog that takes place between the narrator and a character in the novel: 'The advantage for novelists is that they can always invent,' says the character, to which the narrator replies, 'Invention is never gratuitous.' " — Laura Restrepo
". . . Castellón is a pretext through which Ramírez examines along the way the disconcerting labyrinth of Nicaraguan history: the profound contradictions upon which our national state was founded, the political struggles and internal battles between liberals and conservatives, the social residue from the national wars, the never-fulfilled dream of the construction of an inter-ocean canal as a fanciful project of progress, the socio-cultural dichotomy between Nicaragua's Caribbean and the Pacific coasts, and the insuperable laggardness of the Creole worldview which still survives and imposes itself in our day."—Ezequiel D'León Masis
"Ramírez gathers up all the threads and narrative sequences in a skein that carries us along a thrilling route, at times convoluted and with flashes of humor, along which, among others, are paraded a drunken William Walker dressed as a woman dancing atop a table in Paris years before he arrived in Nicaragua, the Archduke Luis Salvador and his odd band, Flaubert, Chopin, Georges Sand, Turgenev, the Mosquito King, the ill-fated project of Nicaragua's inter-ocean canal, the fall of Napoleon III—images that, just like details in a mosaic, are presented to us as much by Sergio the character as by Castellón, who alternates as a second narrative voice in this novel."— Jacinta Escudos, La Prensa Grafica, El Salvador
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