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Zusatztext “Stirring and original . . . It gives us a picture of the country in bright! patchwork colors unavailable in your usual journalistic dispatches.” –The New York Times “A vivid and probing introduction for perplexed outsiders trying to make sense of Nicaraguan dilemmas.” –Newsday “Extraordinary . . . a masterpiece of sympathetic yet critical reporting graced with [Rushdie’s] marvelous wit! quietly assertive style! odd and yet always revealing experiences.” –Edward W. Said Informationen zum Autor Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth . His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages. Klappentext In this timeless! haunting portrait of the people and the politics of Nicaragua! Rushdie brings to life the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. HOPE: A PROLOGUE Ten years ago, when I was living in a small flat above an offlicence in SW1, I learned that the big house next door had been bought by the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The street was obviously going down in the world, what with the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett by that nice Lord Lucan at number 44, and I moved out a few months later. I never met Hope Somoza, but her house became notorious in the street for a burglar alarm that went off with surprising frequency, and for the occasional parties that would cause the street to be jammed solid with Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar limousines. Back in Managua, her husband ‘Tacho’ had taken a mistress, Dinorah, and Hope was no doubt trying to keep her spirits up. Tacho and Dinorah fled Nicaragua on 17 July 1979, so that ‘Nicaragua libre’ was born exactly one month after my own son. (19 July is the formal independence day, because that was when the Sandinistas entered Managua, but the 17th is the real hat-in-air moment, the día de alegría, the day of joy.) I’ve always had a weakness for synchronicity, and I felt that the proximity of the birthdays forged a bond. When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common – not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel. I became a sponsor of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London. I mention this to declare an i...
