A Thousand Deaths Plus One

By Sergio Ramírez

2004

First Published

3.42

Average Rating

356

Number of Pages

10H52M

Audio Length

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 Castellan, who plied his craft in Europe between roughly 1880 and 1940. This incredible 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, Castellan 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 Ruben Dario, 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 history of the exceptionally unfortunate, not to say “nonexistent,” country of Nicaragua.

Avg Rating

3.42

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

10%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

38%

2 STARS

12%

1 STARS

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Author

Sergio Ramírez

Author · 10 books

Sergio Ramírez Mercado (born August 5, 1942 in Masatepe, Nicaragua) is a Nicaraguan writer and intellectual who served in the leftist Government Junta of National Reconstruction and as Vice President of the country 1985-1990 under the presidency of Daniel Ortega. Born in Masatepe in 1942, he published his first book, Cuentos, in 1963. He received his law degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua of León in 1964, where he obtained the Gold Medal for being the best student. In 1977 Ramírez became head of the "Group of Twelve", a group of prominent intellectuals, priests, businesspeople, and members of civil society who publicly stated their support for the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in its struggle to topple the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. With the triumph of the Revolution in 1979, he became part of the Junta of the Government of National Reconstruction, where he presided over the National Council of Education. He was elected vice-president of Nicaragua in 1984 and was sworn in 1985.