Sergio Ramírez: kill like Raskolnikov and pursue dreams like Don Quixote

Sergio Ramírez has accustomed us to high literature with a strong Central American flavor, with humor and a mastery of language at the service of arguments that have mixed history in capital letters with human shame, the vigor of his characters with meanness, the most ambitious with the most prosaic reality.

He has also known how to leave that sphere and plant unique universes, as he did in

Sara.

His new release,

The Golden Horse,

(in Alfaguara, like the rest of his work) rides precisely between those two capacities, those of the foreign and the own: he draws an old Europe that is reeling in the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and runs through it. until taking us to his sentimental Nicaragua.

In this way, Ramírez merges and embroiders two universes, not only geographical, but also literary: at times he is a Latin American Dostoevsky in action, at times a Central European Cervantes entertaining in the Carpathians.

His murderers kill like Raskolnikov and pursue dreams like Don Quixote and Sancho.

We're going to laugh for a while.

In his novel there are knotted scarves, lackeys, imperial seals, elegant hats with stuffed birds, castles that saw better times and princesses who should not lose their virginity in any way, but who do.

In sin there is evil, for our fortune, because the lame lady of rancid ancestry who gets involved with unrecommended characters at the pace of her adventures is going to take us from the Carpathians to Managua passing through Paris, Brest or Istanbul.

One of those characters, the man with whom he undertakes the journey, is a hairdresser “with a beard open in two wings” who has thought he invented a carousel that he wants to take around the world with quite uneven, if not zero, fortune.

That merry-go-round and, especially, the golden horse that stands out from the other figures, will lead us along with Sergio Ramírez, exiled in Spain due to the persecution of the Nicaraguan dictatorship, towards his native place.

This book is still, in some way, the way to return from it.

—“Perhaps in that country of Nicaragua there is a free duchy, suitable for your ambitions, Monsieur”—says the princess to her current lover like Quixote offering an island to his Sancho.

—“There are savages there without law or reason, madame”—the henchman warns her.

The warning won't matter.

There we go with the princess and the carousel.

And along the way we will meet an evil governess, the supposed son of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Habsburg, Emperor of Mexico, the chocolate businessman Henry Menier or the dictator José Santos Zelaya.

A combo of real characters at the service of the author's imagination.

The style is, on the other hand, prodigious.

In addition to trapping us in quixotic adventures with the best tools of the story, the adventure story and endless other theatrical, bureaucratic or journalistic resources, it sometimes applies a round trip path of enormous narrative value: trompe l'oeil, illusion, taking us to where it seems that we must go and then turn back, correct what happened and, in a flash, move to another place that has transformed the plot.

The sum of that combination of sleight of hand and sarcasm will accompany us all the way.

Ramírez, born in Masatepe, Nicaragua, in 1942 and Cervantes Award winner in 2017, has come out here from his personal universe

(Margarita, the sea is beautiful; Goodbye boys),

also from his police career starring Inspector Morales and has given us a hybrid between European and American, imagination and the reins attached to reality.

The golden horse

is, without a doubt, his most generous way of turning exile into beauty.

Look for it in your bookstore

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