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    The Secret History of Costaguana
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    The Secret History of Costaguana
    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Costaguana
    Ebook309 pages6 hours

    The Secret History of Costaguana

    By Juan Gabriel Vasquez

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    About this ebook

    'Splendid' Telegraph
    'Vivid, forceful, masterly' Guardian
    'One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature' Mario Vargas Llosa

    London, 1903. Joseph Conrad is struggling with his new novel ('I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana'). Progress is slow and the great writer needs help from a native of the Caribbean coast of South America.

    José Altamirano, Colombian at birth, who has just arrived in London, answers the great writer's advertisement and tells him his life story. José has been witness to the most horrible things that a person or a country could suffer, and drags with him not just a guilty conscience but a story that has almost destroyed him.

    But when Nostromo is published the following year José is outraged by what he reads: 'You've eliminated me from my own life. You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me.' I waved the Weekly in the air again, and then threw it down on his desk. 'Here,' I whispered, my back to the thief, 'I do not exist.'

    The Secret History of Costaguana, the second novel by Juan Gabriel Vásquez to be published in English, is José Altamirano's riposte to Joseph Conrad. It is a big novel, tragic and despairing, comic and insightful by turns, told by a bumptious narrator with a score to settle. It is Latin America's post-modern answer to Europe's modernist vision. It is a superb, joyful, thoughtful and rumbustious novel that will establish Juan Gabriel Vásquez's reputation as one of the leading novelists of his generation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateOct 18, 2010
    ISBN9781408817476
    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Costaguana
    Author

    Juan Gabriel Vasquez

    Juan Gabriel Vásquez (born 1973) is a Colombian writer, best known for his novel The Sound of Things Falling, originally published in 2011. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His previous books have won the IMPAC Award, the Qwerty prize, the Alfaguara Prize and the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2014 IMPAC Prize. His books have been published in sixteen languages and thirty countries. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogota.

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    • 4/5
      The famous writer Joseph Conrad struggles to provide for his young family in early 20th century London, and is plagued with self-doubt about his ability to become a successful writer. The novel he is working on is set in South America, where he briefly captained a ship along the Colombian coast, but he finds himself unable to recall details about the country or its people, as he spent very little time there. He seeks the assistance of a well connected Colombian émigré, who puts Conrad in touch with José Altamirano, who has recently arrived in the capital. Altamirano shares the troubled and tragic story of his life and country with Conrad, hoping that the great novelist will tell the world what he has experienced. The following year the first segment of Conrad's novel Nostromo is published in a weekly literary magazine, which is set in the fictionalized country of Costaguana. Altamirano is infuriated, as the story is not about him at all, and confronts Conrad: "You've eliminated me from my own life. You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me." The Colombian then decides that only he can tell his story, which serves as a retort to Conrad's life and work.Vásquez uses the life of Altamirano and his father, who was intimately involved in the initial disastrous attempt to build the Panama Canal, to create a fictionalized history of post-independence Colombia and Panama, one filled with opportunistic but deeply flawed characters whose plans brought misery and death upon thousands of its citizens and continue to haunt the country to the present day. The Secret History of Costaguana was an instructional and interesting novel. However, I found it to be a somewhat difficult read, as it was filled with far too many peripheral characters and too much inconsequential detail, which diluted the power of Altamirano's narrative. I would recommend this for anyone interested in the history of 19th century Colombia and Panama, and for anyone who has read Nostromo.