The 3 best books by the great Sergio RamĂ­rez

Talk about the recognized Miguel de Cervantes Award 2017, Sergio Ramirez, is to speak of a controversial author, to the extent that every politically significant writer always ends up being branded as biased. But, in an objective analysis of his work by fiction, of his literary quality per se, one cannot help but admire his legacy. A extensive narrative work (I always talk about fiction) where characters with soul move that offer us their calm perspective of the world.

The contradictions of ideals, the setbacks of moving forward, always leaving behind that other that you were. Existentialist themes but also close ones. Novels of humor or black genre. Whatever you need to compose the story and the setting to which we are kindly invited to pass ... And politics, yes, also politics, but always from the greatest virtues of fiction, which offers the perspective of several characters to be able to confront ideas and naturalize a story that otherwise would never advance.

In such a varied range, it is always difficult to choose. To such an extent that his great novel Nobody cries for me anymore I was just off the podium. The tastes of one are what they are, and the choice can separate a theme simply because of that, by tastes, and may really deserve a higher evaluation. But this is what this Internet has, we each leave our ideas ...

Top 3 recommended books by Sergio RamĂ­rez

Tongolele did not know how to dance

A Nicaraguan-style noir, with all its darkness, already has the historical legacy of a country whose politics is immersed in those unstable roots even in the 80s. A brilliant framework loaded with that ghostly sensation of the strata of power that They still feel that they inhabit scenarios that are easily surpassed by the rest of the world...

We are in the XXI century, in a Nicaragua in which popular revolts are being experienced that are brutally repressed by the government, supported by the sinister executive arm of the head of the secret services. Inspector Dolores Morales must confront in the distance with that terrible being nicknamed Tongolele, ultimately responsible for his exile in Honduras, who moves with coldness and cynicism, partly thanks to the divinatory advice of his mother, many threads of the country's deranged politics .

The masterful prose of Sergio Ramírez gradually reveals a murky network, full of secrets, betrayals and dark maneuvers that Inspector Morales will have to face, backed by the ineffable Lord Dixon, Doña Sofía Smith and the rest of his associates. Because, in that always turbulent Nicaragua, any step can be taken wrongly and cause the definitive collapse of anyone who decides to confront in some way, however ridiculous, the established power.

Tongolele did not know how to dance

That day fell on Sunday

A good book of stories has to be titled with the point of ambiguity capable of housing the stories that cascade beyond the cover. With that perspective, a suggestive point and the certainty that several Sundays await us with their cadence different from the rest of the days of the week, we enjoy the most fascinating encounters...

A woman combats loneliness by doing crossword puzzles. A wealthy family finds out that their son has befriended the son of a drug dealer. A man suffers from impotence and goes to an unspeakable urologist. Another sees his quiet life as a gardener fortuitously altered. An entire town is massacred in Guatemala by a contingent of the army who had been invited to a barbecue...

The stories in That day fell on Sunday revolve around four fundamental themes: family and love, #individual and collective#memory, death and everyday life. Here are all the keys to the narrative of the author, considered one of the masters of the genre in Spanish: humor, his preference for losing protagonists who contain all the dignity of the world and the irreducible commitment to the human being.

That day fell on Sunday

Divine punishment

A total novel in which we find everything. Latin America under a magnifying glass to highlight those nuances typical of a very particular idiosyncrasy.

Summary: In Divine Punishment, love and sex, political intrigue and economic power come together to create one of the most complex and fascinating novels about Central American society. A string of murders by poisoning takes place in the city of LeĂłn, Nicaragua, in the XNUMXs.

The alleged murderer, a brilliant lawyer and poet, will also be one more victim, when his particular story reaches collective dimensions, and the ethical sense is upset on the eve of the dictatorship perpetrated from Nicaragua to Guatemala.

Sergio RamĂ­rez's writing underlies the serialized novel, the journalistic report, the intricate legal language, the modernist images, as well as representing one of the most neat tributes to the novelistic tradition.

Divine punishment

Other interesting books by Sergio RamĂ­rez ...

The golden horse

Life is a carousel. Everything happens again due to the very determination of human beings to repeat sins and search for impossible pasts that we hope to find by submerging ourselves in the centrifugal force of memories. Everything else is a resounding evolution that is responsible for taking us out of that senseless spin. And from there this great little story...

This is the story of a princess of the Carpathian rural nobility who wore a splint fitted with countersunk screws and cowhide straps on her left leg. From a hairdresser who sculpted horses, with a bushy beard open in two wings, who she believed had invented the carousel. From a merchant, also with a bushy beard on two wings, who believed himself to be the son of Emperor Maximilian. And about a talkative and cunning cook who saved a dictator from dying.

The hairdresser inventor ends his days poisoned and his corpse is thrown to the bottom of a river. The trade factor ends his own facing a firing squad. And the cook has his end carried away by a raging stream of rain, in a drunken state. It begins in 1905 in the village of Siret, then territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ends in Managua in 1917, under the military occupation of the United States, with a conspiracy with an unexpected ending.

The golden horse is also the story of a carousel that arrived after a long sea voyage to Nicaragua, and with which the princess later went from town to town, from patron saint's festival to patron saint's festival, the wooden horses becoming increasingly worn out. by the time.

Sergio RamĂ­rez displays all his narrative mastery in this delicious novel halfway between an adventure story and that of entanglements, palace intrigues and modern picaresque. Full of humor and imagination, The Golden Horse narrates the journey from a Europe that no longer exists to a troubled Nicaragua to fulfill the improbable dream of an inventor who invented what was already invented.

One thousand and one deaths

We die every time we think that the world is the way it is, that is, when we convince ourselves that our senses are reality. The more we cling to an ideal, the harder the fall can be. It is not about going lukewarm through life. Rather, it is a matter of accepting the subjectivity of everything.

Summary: The reader will see through the eye of his camera the amazing falsification of our nationalities, the defeated fantasy of ideals and utopias, the most persistent of them the canal through Nicaragua, and the call for genius and misery in various scenarios , from the port of Greytown in Nicaragua, with its marble palaces in the middle of the jungle, to the Warsaw ghetto and the Cartuja monastery in Mallorca.

One thousand and one deaths

A masquerade ball

How likely is it that everything happens just because? Surely the same that everything happens with mathematical predestination. Reaching the world is an isolated event ..., or not. The world is no longer the same with one more guest at the masked ball ...

Summary: A child is going to be born on August 5, 1942 in Masatepe, a town like any other in Latin America, and all imaginable events seem to combine relentlessly around that fact, as in the multiple tracks of a circus.

Hidden behind the celebration of a provincial masked ball, the arrival of this little one into the world is almost a matter of luck in the midst of a whirlwind of events that give it special meaning.

With an overflowing humor, an extraordinary mastery in the weave of such varied plots and a malicious touch in front of what is nothing but the origin of his own birth, in Un baile de mascaras Sergio RamĂ­rez pays tribute to a time, a place and a people who become so specific universal and thereby achieve a singular work in the American narrative.

A masquerade ball
5/5 - (12 votes)

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