The Secret History of Costaguana

April 18, 2011
On the day Joseph Conrad dies in England, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write, for the edification of his daughter, the true story of his life and country, which were taken, compressed, and repurposed by Conrad in Nostromo. This is the jumping-off point for the imaginative if flawed latest from Vásquez (The Informers), a bristling counternovel that aims to retrieve from Conrad's work two revolutions and the endless series of coups, gunfights, and voyages that characterize Colombia's "convulsive times." José begins with the story of his radical, exiled father, Miguel, who he goes to find in Panama. But he finds more than he bargained for: yellow fever outbreaks, the burning of Colón, plans for a strategically imperative canal, a visit by Sarah Bernhardtâand Conrad himself, whose own history is interwoven with the rest. Vásquez is piercing in his attentions to who documents history and howâwhether in letters, newspaper articles, folk songs, or literatureâbut the litany of battles and names captured here essentially smothers the novel's potential and fails to unseat its inspiration, not because this is made of more truth than fiction but because the informed fiction that results dismisses personality, romance, and style for zealous veracity.

Starred review from April 15, 2011

An ambitious picaresque tale about civil war, love, propaganda and the Panama Canal, delivered with verve and wit.

The inspiration for the second novel by Vásquez (The Informers, 2009) is Joseph Conrad's 1904 classic Nostromo, which depicted warfare and greed in the mythical country of Costaguana. José Altamirano, the narrator of Vásquez's novel, knows Costaguana was a stand-in for his native Colombia, and he's eager to correct Conrad by telling the truth about his country through much of the 19th and early 20th century. He does this both in broad strokes and through the lives of his loved ones, who suffered their share of tragedies: From the yellow fever that kills close friends to the long civil war that tragically affected family members, loss and death routinely stalk José. Yet his tone remains kindly and often comic. He smirkingly observes the bizarre coincidences in his life, the foibles of the so-called leaders who drove the country into civil war with what is now Panama, and the contempt of the American imperialists who ended the war with a land-grab. José inherited his sensibility from his father, who came of age provoking conservative religious authorities and later wrote propaganda on behalf of a French company making an early attempt to dig the Panama Canal. Such inventions support the novel's theme that words matter, particularly when they're false: José's father's upbeat prose kept the canal-building effort alive in its funders' imaginations despite its doomed reality; yellow journalism fueled the civil war; and Conrad's novel, in José's estimation, rudely defined the country as backwards. As Colombia collapses into civil war in the final chapters of the book, Vásquez elegantly chronicles the violence and absurdity of war while conveying a sense of bemused fatedness. That the author can make his hero so entertaining without diminishing the gravity of the bloodshed is a testament to his talents.

To read this novel is to enter a Borgesian rabbit hole—it's a fiction that purports to tell the truth obscured by another fiction—yet its strangeness helps make it both brave and engaging.

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January 1, 2011

An award-winning Colombian author acknowledged worldwide, Vasquez broke onto the American scene last year with The Informers. Here, he takes as his starting point Joseph Conrad's great novel Nostromo, prompted by a visit to Colombia that lasted only a few days. (That novel's setting is the imagined country of Costaguana.) The conceit here is that Conrad got his ideas from Colombian author Jose Altamirano, who wants to set the record straight. Sophisticated readers will be discussing.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2011
If there was ever a man caught in the vice of history, its Jos' Altamirano, hero of Vsquez remarkable second novel (following The Informers, 2009). Altamirano speaks to us from London in 1924, where he is in exile from his native Colombia. He vows to tell us the real story of Colombia and its endless civil wars, which have torn his family asunder, in spite of his valiant but doomed attempt to forge a separate peace. But not only did politics run roughshod over his life, his story has been stolen from himby none other than Joseph Conrad, who, looking for information about Colombia from a native son, encounters Altamirano and transforms his account into Nostromo, set in the fictional country of Costaguana. Vowing to set the record straight, Altamirano spins his elaborate, multitextured tale of betrayalnot only his betrayal at the hands of the great Conrad but also his own betrayal of his daughter and his countrys betrayal of itself. The story moves from the river port of Honda, where he lived with his mother, to the city of Colon in Panama (then a part of Colombia), where he tracks down his father and becomes embroiled in the politics of what would eventually be the Panama Canal. Vsquez sings in many different keys, but his central theme is always present: history as an angel of death, slogging its uncaring way through the lives of individuals much as the monstrous dredging machines assaulted the Panamanian swamp. This is a deeply lyrical, stylistically and thematically rich novel from an important writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)