The Secret History of Costaguana
by Vasquez, Juan Gabriel
- Used
- very good
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Very Good
- ISBN 10
- 1408800187
- ISBN 13
- 9781408800188
- Seller
-
Seattle, Washington, United States
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About This Item
Synopsis
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 Vásquez'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 José 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, 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 talented novelists working today.
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Details
- Bookseller
- ThriftBooks (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- G1408800187I4N10
- Title
- The Secret History of Costaguana
- Author
- Vasquez, Juan Gabriel
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- ISBN 10
- 1408800187
- ISBN 13
- 9781408800188
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury UK
- Place of Publication
- London
- Date Published
- 2010
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