In 1987, while on a state visit to Warsaw, the author happened upon an exhibition of remarkable works by a hitherto unknown Nicaraguan photographer, Juan Castelln, who plied his craft in Europe between roughly 1880 and 1940. This improbable discovery launches Ramirez on a consuming quest to reveal the forgotten artist's identity -- an obsession that eventually takes him from Nicaragua to Vienna to Mallorca, and leads him to sift through the evidentiary...