The writer, currently exiled in Costa Rica, presents his new novel “Atardecer en Venecia” [“Nightfall in Venice”], the second in a trilogy set amid the crisis Nicaragua is currently experiencing.
HAVANA TIMES – “This novel is full of villains, just like today’s Nicaragua which is full of villains who believe that justice will never reach them, that they’re going to go on this way forever,” exiled Nicaraguan writer Arquimedes Gonzales tells the Spanish-based EFE news agency. Gonzalez has chronicled the social reality of his country through his latest work, Atardecer en Venecia, currently available only in Spanish.
Born in Managua in 1972, Arquimedes Gonzalez tells his stories through fiction but with the rigor of a journalist, using these elements to portray “the origins of the dictatorship and its evils” in Nicaragua. He addresses the topic through his latest novel, Atardecer en Venecia, second of a trilogy that began with Como esperando Abril [“Ás if waiting for April”]. The latter was banned in Nicaragua by the government of Daniel Ortega.
In addition to unveiling a country that Ortega wants to hide, the novel presents a current problem: the world of narcotrafficking as the nerve and motor force of politics in the Americas. That was the view of the jury for the Juegos Florales Hispanoamericanos [“Hispanic-American Flower Games”] competition based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, who selected the book as one of its finalists.
The jury for the IV Medellin Noir Crime Novel Competition, has also named the book a finalist. The panel stated that it “constitutes a harsh portrait of the violence and gang culture in Nicaragua.”
The novel exposes the moral, structural, and cultural corruption of a society in crisis, which to the writer – who is also a journalist – is at the root of all the evil.
Gonzalez
