Ebook {Epub PDF} The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

 · The result is The Secret History of Costaguana, rendered into English by Anne McLean in a smooth and creatively faithful version, full of the happiest turns Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins. Three years before publishing this novel, Vásquez wrote a biography of Joseph Conrad so it is perhaps not so surprising that he would write a novel featuring Joseph Conrad. Costaguana is the fictitious country Conrad uses in Nostromo, based on Colombia, which Conrad visited in his sailing days, while engaged in illegal gunrunning. (It should be remembered that in Conrad’s day and during the period of . As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Vásquez 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 Vásquez's place among the most original and exuberantly .

Praise for The Secret History of Costaguana "Audacious a potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." —Los Angeles Times "An exceptional new novel." —The Wall Street Journal. Praise for Juan Gabriel Vásquez "One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature.". Praise for The Secret History of Costaguana "Audacious a potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." — Los Angeles Times "An exceptional new novel." —The Wall Street Journal Praise for Juan Gabriel Vásquez "One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature.". Juan Gabriel Vásquez is no stranger to secret histories: his first publication was A Secret History of all the Saints and his second novel, The Informers, is also shot through with parallel lives.

The best lines in “The Secret History of Costaguana” were written by Joseph Conrad. Harsh, maybe, but such is the treatment that its Colombian author, Juan Gabriel Vásquez (“The Informers. Vásquez employs the familiar wry tone that can be found in many other Latin American novels, but The Secret History of Costaguana is in conversation with realism - with Conrad's Nostromo - rather than with the sorts of stories that resort to mythology to address politics. There is quite a bit of politics, war, and empire building in this novel, and Altamirano engages with these realities head on. The Secret History of Costaguana is Jose Altamirano's life, one fictional character's intersection with the troubled history of Turn of the Century Columbia and the building of the Panama Canal and Panama's resultant secession. It's amazing how prominently Jose's presence is at the centre of things, politically, psychologically.