Unsafe Spaces in Sergio Ramírez´s <em>Tongolele no sabía bailar</em>

Abstract

Sergio Ramírez, winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize, finishes his Inspector Dolores Morales trilogy with the 2021 novel Tongolele no sabía bailar (Dead Man Cast No Shadow). In the fiction, the protagonist is no longer a member of the National Police, as he was in the first work in the series; nor the private detective of the second novel, but, rather, a persecuted man in his own country. Despite his new status as marked man he undertakes several journeys and becomes displaced a number of times: 1) he clandestinely crosses the border between Honduras and Nicaragua; 2) he puts himself in unsafe places as a consequence of the repressive Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo regime; 3) he mentally travels to the past of the Nicaraguan Revolution; 4) he opens new spaces of investigation through social media; 5) he transcends emotional limits. This article analyzes these transgressions and multiplications of narrated spaces using tools from narratology and literary cartography. Accordingly, it shows that the precarious status of the inspector results in a fragmentation of the criminal investigation.