The Second Death of Ramon Mercader

The first Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotsky near a garden wall beneath the yellow sun of Mexico. This is the story of a second Mercader, twenty-five years later, in Amsterdam. But is it the same man, Trotsky's assassin? He is a killer, and deeply entangled in a strange kaleidoscope of events. When he arrives in Amsterdam on a mysterious mission, agents from the CIA, the East German Secret Police, and the Russian KGB, converge on the Dutch metropolis to shadow his every move. He sends telegrams, roams through the city, waits. A few days later he is found dead in his hotel room. From the moment Mercader's plane lands in Amsterdam to the final tragic climax, which turns into a transcontinental manhunt, Jorge Semprun grips the reader's attention in an important contemporary novel that poses in the guise of a spy thriller taut with suspense.

On one level an exciting spy story in which the warring agents of Russia, America, and East Germany clash in the dark byways of Amsterdam, The Second Death of Ramon Mercader is far more than a fashionable thriller. It is a grand panorama of our violent time that traverses the high hopes of Soviet Communism and the collapse of ideology, the death of causes, the death of hopes, bright new worlds forever turning foul.

Text: English, French (translation)