A Thousand Deaths Plus One

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.