Novel
Divine Punishment
Castigo divino
Sergio Ramírez · 1988
Synopsis
León, 1933. The young wife of Oliverio Castañeda, a law student with a reputation as a seducer, dies suddenly. The family of don Carmen Contreras then takes the widower in; within a few months Matilde, the eldest daughter, and then don Carmen himself also die. The town murmurs, the doctors disagree about the causes of the deaths, and a young judge, Mariano Fiallos, opens the inquiry, caught between rumours, the press, the interests of the local notables and the dictator of Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, who gets involved.
Context
The author published this novel in 1988, while he was vice-president in the Sandinista government. He built it on a real case of alleged poisonings, investigated in León in 1933, and made of it a montage of letters, judicial records, depositions, testimonies and press articles, in the manner of a case file. The book appeared in Madrid with Mondadori; it was translated into French in 1994 and into English in 2015.
Who it is for
A long novel in Spanish, translated into French, which the multiplication of documents and witnesses makes demanding at first.
Prizes and reception
It received in 1990 the Dashiell Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish, awarded in Spain.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.