Muddle in Managua

The title of PURA VIDA is misleading. There are quite a few chapters which tells the "Life & death of William Walker," but this novel is also the author's journey story in Latin America in 1997, his meetings with tired or disillusioned revolutionary poets and some bloody episodes of the tormented history of Honduras and Nicaragua.
The figure of William Walker (1824-1860) through the novel. It is an American adventurer who made several coup in Latin America. He manages to get elected president of Nicaragua from 1856 to 1857 and was put to death by the Honduran government in 1860. But Patrick DEVILLE evokes other historical figures like Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557), César Sandino (1895- 1934) and Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua ...
The narrative is winding and the thin thread. Patrick DEVILLE we ride from Managua to Tegucigalpa, multiplies the round trip between past and present, invents coincidences and correspondences between the places and dates of former Sandinistas meeting and an amnesiac, breaststroke ideas and ideals Forgot Great story single news items, wars of independence to plumbing problems of his hotel.
The writing is elegant but the narrative convolution bothered me and bothered scholarly catalog. The novel does not give me away, I stayed on the shores of Lake Xolotlan ...