Author: Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Year: 2007
Rank:
Rating:
Original Rating:
Pop Rating:
Genres/categories:
Fiction, Historical fiction
Purchase/reserch links:
ISBNs:
9781594488030
1594488037 |
| 
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 Vasquez'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 Jose 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, Vasquez 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 Vasquez's place among the most original and exuberantly talented novelists working today.
Similar books:
|
