Year: 1977
Editorial: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España
Collection: Biblioteca Premios Cervantes
Language: Español, Catalán
ISBN: 9788437507958
Pages: 304
Synopsis: “Were you scared by the Blood?” written by Sergio Ramirez in Berlin between 1973 and 1975, is a novel whose main characters, as the author makes clear in the prologue to this edition, are “failed conspirators, military men who pay with their lives the uprising, prisoners living in cages next to those of wild beasts, exiles without fortune, wandering hawkers, godforsaken cabaret bartenders, musical trios dragged about by the downpour of violence.” There is also a Miss Nicaragua, who is so thanks to a rigged election result (sad allegory of the generalized fraud of present-day politics), a piñatas salesperson persecuted for sedition, Rubén Darío kept in formaldehyde, another head carried in a bag of line from Honduras, baseball players, boxers, gamblers, prostitutes or healers. And, of course, the man, the dictator that vertebrates from the shadow, and infecting everything of the fierce and dirty darkness he embodies, events, landscapes and biographies.
Set in the Nicaragua in-between the cruel transition between the Somoza regime and the Sandinista one, some thirty years of ups and downs and hard clashes (also of hope and heroics), “Were you scared by the Blood?” is an indispensable novel to understand from within how institutionalized injustices produce wounds that only the courage of a people up in arms can heal. Written with great rhythm, lots of humor, ability to analyze, profound empathy and top notch literature, would be the first declaration of engagement by Sergio Ramírez, Premio Cervantes 2017, with a country of which, just after it went to print, he’d become vice-president.
