Juan Gabriel VÃ¡squez,Anne McLean
A bold historical novel from "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature" (Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature). , , In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel ,Nostromo,, about a South American republic he named Costaguana. It was inspired by the geography and history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days. But in Juan Gabriel VÃ¡squez's novel ,The Secret History of Costaguana,, we uncover the hidden source- and one of the great literary thefts. , On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born JosÃ© Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail-from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Conrad stole them all. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear- Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, VÃ¡squez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back. , Tragic and despairing, comic and insightful, ,The Secret History of Costaguana, is a masterpiece of historical invention. It will secure Juan Gabriel VÃ¡squez's place among the most original and exuberantly talented novelists working today.
Fiction,Historical,Historical Fiction,Cultural,Latin American,European Literature,Spanish Literature,Literature,Historical,Literature,21st Century,Contemporary
The Secret History of Costaguana