Madrid: Alfaguara, 2024. 424 pages.
The most recent novel by Sergio Ramírez (Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942), 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize winner, is titled El caballo dorado, “the golden horse,” which ends up being a beautifully carved and painted wooden rocking horse leading the herd of horses on a carousel. The main character is Princess María Aleksándrovna, a down-on-her-luck princess who is often said to be crippled and needs to use “a splint with countersunk screws and cowhide straps on her left leg” to walk. Her father is a drunk who plays L’Hombre every night with his employees and everyday loses what little inheritance he received. “Now nothing remains of the old property other than a few desyatinas of pasture at the foot of the crag, where María Aleksándrovna herds a smaller flock of goats and sheep.” At the first opportunity, the princess runs away with the town barber, Anatoli Florea, wooden rocking-horse carver and presumed inventor of the carousel that will fascinate the masses by the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, “on the slatted posts in front of his door there is a golden horse strung up, carved out of birch, its mane in the wind, its head defiant, its lips enlarged, and its front legs poised to move forward or to jump from the void below its hooves.”
As often happens in Ramírez’s novels, the course of narration provides an investigation into the matter, utilizing a wide variety of documents, letters, articles, police reports, imaginary scenes, and even anonymous accounts of dubious veracity. One section of chapter two presents us with an article titled “Anatoli Florea, inventor of the carousel?” which happens to be chapter seven of the book Documented History of the Carrousel, published in the United Kingdom in 1936. Thus we find out that the carousel had already been invented, which does not diminish the talents of Anatoli, who in his notebooks (one with blue covers and another with black covers) wrote down all the details about the construction, mechanisms, and design of his carousel. El caballo dorado is also a metafiction of the art of storytelling. In chapter one, the princess compares the version of “Little Red Riding Hood” told by the castle’s kitchen maid with the version told by Perrault that she reads in a book her father bought her. This serves as a preface for readers, foreshadowing that, in the process of reading, we will find ourselves confronted by different versions of stories, with contradictory facts and with betrayals that compel us to read with suspicion.
El caballo dorado is one of the more scholarly, detailed, and meticulous novels by Sergio Ramírez, an author whose work stands out for its structural complexity, linguistic wealth, innovation, and diversity. Since his first novel, Tiempo de fulgor (1970), Ramírez has proven to be a complex narrator, willing to lift the curtains of his storytelling to force the reader to read closely, to look at the text again, to reread between the lines and discern what is going on. However, he has also proven to be extremely interested in the reality of diegesis, in the details, in the smells that circulate through the atmosphere and in the brands of products. It is therefore wonderful to delve into this novel that begins in Romania in the nineteenth century and admire the documentary richness the author handles, the proliferation of bibliographic references he reveals, or the casual way in which he mentions a fact and later confirms it with a quote or bibliographic reference. Consider, for example, in chapter one, when he speaks about Prince Aleksándr Vasílievich Korchak, María’s father, and quotes Elinor Barber’s book, The Slavic Countryside Nobility (1898), to demonstrate that being a prince is not such a big deal. The title was used to designate a certain peasant landowner class, and not necessarily a powerful person in line for the throne. He finishes off this explanation by quoting Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s novels, where “we find mountain princes at every step”.
“The narrator of El caballo dorado is quite conscious of his role as narrator and at certain moments he interrupts the plot to make metanarrative notes or remarks about the events”
If anything, this book may be overly encyclopedic and elaborate. The author has mentioned in interviews the example of the art of painting carousel horses, and especially that of obtaining the particular stain for the golden horse. “The glowing gold that comes from potassium cyanide” is the section where he explains how to achieve that tone, as detailed by Anatoli in his black rubber-covered notebook. Potassium cyanide is also the poison destined for the princess that ends Anatoli’s life and dreams of being the inventor of the carousel. The research that the novel entails is overwhelming, above all in the world of the first part, which is perhaps unknown and distant to Latin American readers. In chapter six, he mentions all the names that have been used for the carousel, he describes all the necessary pieces to build a carousel, and in chapter seven we find an addendum to the list of parts.
The narrator of El caballo dorado is quite conscious of his role as narrator and at certain moments he interrupts the plot to make metanarrative notes or remarks about the events. In the novel, we often find sections whose origin is not clearly identified, printed in a smaller font than the normal text. For example, the section titled “Heated Pursuit,” which is composed of four fragments, we read as part of the novel until the end, when we learn that it is a narrative that occurs in the mind of Vasili Ciprian, Prince Aleksánder’s employee, who has gradually been winning all his holdings from him in their L’Hombre games. Ramírez draws on a wide variety of narrative texts, from intercepted letters, police reports, historical texts, Giuseppe Tartini’s dream (in which he makes a deal with the devil), and the booklet of Mexican Julio Sedano (who claims to be the son of emperor Maximilian I), to Colombian poet Julio Flórez’s testimony and an article by Francisco Huezo.
The last part of the book takes place in Nicaragua in 1910, where María Aleksándrovna arrives at the request of President José Santos Zelaya to set up the carousel that so fascinates people in Europe. Because of this, the carousel ends up touring many of the country’s cities and towns, at fairs and festivals of patron saints, already in a disastrous state, “the golden steed’s mane broken, the roses on the chipped horse collars beyond repair, and more than a few others replaced by fiberglass animals.”
El caballo dorado is another excellent novel by Sergio Ramírez, where he once again proves to be a master of the narrative art, having an excellent command of his prose and a vast descriptive ability. In an age where prosaism is all the rage and messy realism prevails, this novel displays a rich and elegant style, renewing the commitment to making literature exemplary, entertaining, and valuable.
Translated by Jared Peterson
