Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 – April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly self-identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies. Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejo_Carpentier
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The Kingdom of This World: A Novel by Alejo Carpentier - The Haitian revolution is the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world. It is an incredible story, which has been told well by many great authors. This is one of them. Carpentier's novel traces the history of the conflict through the eyes of TiNoel, a slave on the estate of the French planter Lenormand de Mezy in the Plaine du Nord on the fertile north of the French colony of Ste Domingue. The first historical character we meet is Francois Mackandal or Macandal, who attempted to kill the planters with poison and create a free black nation. Next we meet Dutty Boukman or Bouckman, who launched the revolution at a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caiman in August 1791. We learn about the terror, the struggle, and the flight of the French as TiNoel accompanies his master to Cuba. We are introduced to the French General Leclerc, who is sent to Ste Domingue with an army and fleet to reestablish French control, and also meet his wife Pauline Bonaparte and her masseur Soliman. TiNoel returns to Ste Domingue and journeys to the palace of Sans Souci, where he is forced to work on the construction of Le Citadelle La Ferriere and takes part in the sacking of the empire of Henri Christophe, the black king of northern Haiti. The book ends with the flight of Henri's Queen and daughters, as well as Soliman, to Italy. The main omission in this story is Toussaint L'Ouverture, who is barely mentioned, and he is the most important character in the revolution. The book is ultimately about life, about struggles to achieve greatness, whether it be a plantation or an empire, and about suffering and ruin. Carpentier ends his story by noting that "In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won", therefore "man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in The Kingdom of This World". It would be good to read up on the Haitian Revolution before starting your read. The Wikipedia account will suffice. Read more:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kingdom-This-World-Novel/product-reviews/0374530114/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1
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The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier - Unfulfilled by writing commissioned film scores and disillusioned by the pretence and vacuity of his life in New York, a composer takes up an offer to go to the Amazon jungle to look for the rudimentary musical instruments that would provide evidence of a theory about the origin of music that he had developed as a student. The original plan of taking the money and his lover and defrauding the university so that they could enjoy an extended holiday in South America goes badly wrong when they unexpectedly get caught up in a revolution there and are forced into the jungle. Travelling at first with his mistress from New York and then with a mestizzo lover taken up along the way, the book describes in wonderful Baroque prose the awesome scale and sense of time reversal that he experiences in his dark, dripping travels into a world of perpetual greenness. He senses that he is retracing the steps of humanity. Finally, deep in the jungle he is faced with having to make an almost mystical choice about his life and life work. The `simple' life is uncompromisingly portrayed in its pitiless and raw brutality and yet somehow the `noble savage' still retains the essence of humanity, a survivor in the natural world stripped of the worthless accoutrements and gadgets of modern life. This is at once adventure, allegory, love story, morality tale, and academic tract, but above all it is storytelling at its majestic best, a minor masterpiece of post-war literature. Carpentier was the first writer to coin the phrase `magical realism' where myths, fables and religion are interwoven into narratives without faithful adherence to time or reality. The form is taken to its extreme in Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, and these two authors remain magical realism's most accomplished exponents. Although the style has influenced writers worldwide, for me it doesn't seem to work beyond Latin America. Read more:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-Steps-Alejo-Carpentier/product-reviews/0816638071/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1
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Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier - This is one of the best novels in the world. Maybe there are some muddy patches in the English-language edition, which is a translation of a French translation, but I think on the whole it transmits the amazingly rich prose of Carpentier, for whom language, history, life itself are all one music. The overt theme is the French Revolution, though mostly as viewed from France's colonies in the New World. The buried theme is gnosticism, the conviction that things could be different, could be better, that common reality is a sort of veil hiding what we might make of it if we only woke up. The Revolution at first feels like that gnostic awakening, and Carpentier captures that sense of possibility more beautifully than even Wordsworth. In many ways this novel parallels Calvino's Baron in the Trees; in others, Shelley's epic poem The Revolt of Islam (titled Laon and Cythna in its uncensored version). More essentially, it's like coming into your own in your late teens, seeing how wrong the so-called grownups have let things become, knowing it's for you and those like you to claim and remake life itself - then suffering every horrible, painful, perhaps inevitable setback one would expect such a project to run into on such an Earth. Carpentier shows people whose souls curdle, under this reverse wave. But he shows others who don't, lost selves we might even yet, even now, step into. Read more:
http://www.amazon.com/Explosion-Cathedral-Alejo-Carpentier/product-reviews/081663808X/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1
Video by All About - Alejo Carpentier
