A thousand deaths plus one : a novel / by Sergio Ramírez ; translated from the Spanish by Leland H. Chambers

The narrative of a search for the lost history of an obscure Nicaraguan photographer named Juan Castellón. In 1987, the author/narrator, while on an state visit to Poland, happened upon an exhibition of hitherto unknown photographs by Castellón, who had pursued a career in Europe between roughly 1870 and 1940. The discovery initiates an obsessive quest to recover the lost artist's history¿a quest that eventually carries the author from Vienna to Mallorca with points in between as he sifts through a trove of documentary evidence concerning a raffish cast of European and Central American characters. In alternating chapters Castellón offers his own story, from his bizarre conception in Nicaragua, to his education in France, to his nights of serious drinking with Rubén Darío, and lastly to a compromised finale in Nazi Germany. The result is a novel that may be said to personify the tragi-comic history of Nicaragua.