The Secret History of Costaguana

London, 1903.Joseph Conrad is struggling with his new novel ('I am placing in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana'). Progress is slow and the great writer needs help from a native of South America. José Altamirano, Colombian by birth and just arrived in London, comes to the great write's aid and teels him his life story. José has been witness to the most horrible things that a person or a contry could suffer, and drags with him not just a guilty conscience but a story that has almost destroyed him.

But when NOSTROMO is publish the following tear 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 publish in English, is José Altamiro's risposte to Joseph Conrad. It is a big novel, tragic and despairing, comic and insightful by turns, told by a bumptious narrador with a score to settle. It is a Latin America's postmodern answer to Europe's modernist vision. It is a superb, joyful, boisterous and thougtful novel that will confirm Juan Gabriel Vásquez's reputation as one of the leading novelists of his generation.