THE SECOND DEATH OF RAMON MERCADER

by Jorge Semprun ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 1973

A rose may smell sweet no matter what you call it, but to be Ramon Mercader, the namesake of Trotsky's assassin, is ""just asking for trouble"" and attention. Both Mercaders -- the historical figure and Semprun's fictional protagonist -- were Kremlin secret agents, but while the first served the Revolution as a ""pure militant"" slaying counter-revolutionary devils, the second has no motives save perhaps to avenge his father, who may be either a Spanish lawyer shot by a roving Francoist band or an Old Bolshevik gunned down in one of Stalin's camps, both unrepentant. The fictional Mercader is in Amsterdam, ostensibly to conclude a business deal, but really to report to the KBG or perhaps to defect to the West; for three days he is trailed by -- or tries to contact -- the CIA (whose agents are in turn followed by a brace from East Germany who also show an interest in Mercader) before dying mysteriously in his hotel room -- a suicide or murder victim. There is, of course, more to all these machinations than who has spied on whom -- ""History repeats itself like a farce, don't you think?"" the Old Man, Mercader's employer once asked him, and the novel is filled with fortuitous collisions and coincidences -- Mercader speaks in a bar with a man who killed his Spanish father and dies on the Spanish Republic's birthday. There are also symbols -- pictures, songs, faces, gestures -- evoking memories in a haphazard manner; events are rather like ""moves on a chessboard on which no one could see all the squares nor the arrangement of the pieces."" That a story must unfold unilinearly is Aristotle's classic notion which Semprun has chosen to ignore. His The Long Voyage (1964) was more direct and gripping, but this nouveau roman still manages to hammer out a multidimensional universe in which -- as in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, another of Semprun's references -- dogs' carcasses are buried side by side with men.

Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove Press--dist. by Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1973

Categories: FICTION