Inspired by the first hate crime in Spain, ‘An imbecile in paradise’ will be presented on April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the Espacio Santos Ochoa de Calvo Sotelo, 19 in Logroño.
When the Dominican Lucrecia Pérez emigrated to Spain to earn a living as a maid, she left her little girl Kenya, only six years old, in her country with the illusion of reunion.
They never saw each other again.
Luis Merino Pérez, a civil guard with neo-Nazi ideology, shot dead Lucrecia Pérez on November 13, 1992, for fun, in an abandoned nightclub in Madrid where she was having soup with some compatriots.
It was the first xenophobic crime of Spanish democracy.
30 years later, far from disappearing, hate crimes have multiplied, encouraged by the emerging fascism.
That is what the new novel by Javier Osés (Villar de Torre, 1963) from La Rioja is about: An imbecile in paradise, which will be presented on Wednesday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m., in the Espacio Santos Ochoa (Calvo Sotelo, Logroño) and who wants to pay tribute to Lucrecia Pérez and her daughter Kenia, who currently resides in our country and who, through the Movement against Intolerance, fights, day by day, to build a fairer, more supportive and more humane society. . That society that her mother was looking for when he said goodbye to her with a lot of kisses and with many tears in her eyes, in those eyes where the brightness of hope in the human being shone.
In a satirical key, An Imbecile in Paradise recreates the adventures of a neo-Nazi who goes by the nickname Hess, in memory of Adolf Hitler’s lieutenant, and who, after shooting an emigrant to death, flees from the police and in his escape, through From a delirious means of communication, he arrives at what seems to be paradise.
There everyone is happy and enjoys feeding their spirit with the fruits of the fine arts, music, literature, painting, sculpture…
But Hess, far from giving in to the temptation to participate in this festival of the senses, decides to return to earth, to his home, get hold of a gun and return to paradise again to impose his law, the law of the jungle, at a shot. clean.
At the presentation of the novel, Javier Osés will be supported by Rosanna Valdez Cepeda, a compatriot of Lucrecia Pérez who will recount the experience of Dominicans in La Rioja and, logically, his own.
On successive days, Osés will present Un imbécile en el paraíso to groups of vulnerable people, such as migrants and battered women. Likewise, it will accept the invitations that political parties and unions send it in this regard, while it will celebrate presentation events in various county heads, such as Santo Domingo de la Calzada (April 14) or Nájera (April 21).
In addition to the different bookstores in Santos Ochoa, Un imbecile en el paraíso can be obtained through the main online sales platforms, such as Amazon.
Conceived as a vaccine against fascism, An Imbecile in Paradise is the fifth novel by journalist and writer Javier Osés, born in the Rioja town of Villar de Torre in 1963, just one league away from the Emilian monasteries of Yuso and Suso. , of which he declares himself a devoted admirer as the starting point of our universal language. Before, he published, in this order, The student from San Millán in love, A million friends, The girl who whistled when she stopped crying and The magic rhombus of La Rioja, in addition to the centenary history of the Modern Café in Logroño. In his books, Osés alternates his rejection of all kinds of violence and fanaticism with his love for La Rioja, its traditions and its wines.
