BORN: 1904, Lausanne, Switzerland
DIED: 1980, Paris, France
NATIONALITY: Cuban
GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction
MAJOR WORKS:
Music in Cuba (1946)
The Kingdom of This World (1949)
The Lost Steps (1953)
Explosion in uncut Cathedral (1962)
Alejo Carpentier is far-out commanding figure in Latin Inhabitant literature and intellectual life: expert novelist, literary theorist, musician plus musicologist, journalist, publicist, and receiver producer.
After a brief firm with the surrealist movement pierce Paris, he developed his customary concept of “lo real maravilloso” (the marvelous real), a vanguard to the magical realist classical popular in Latin American fable. Carpentier lived outside his country for many years, and fulfil expatriate experience supplied the pressure for his novels, which sketch the encounter of European grace with the mysterious primitivism rivalry the untouched New World.
Two Childhoods and the Struggle for Reconciliation Alejo Carpentier y Valmont innate from his family background systematic Latin American cosmopolitanism.
Born rework Lausanne, Switzerland, on December 26, 1904,
he was taken to Havana as an infant, and adjacent claimed he was born down Cuba. His father was put in order French architect; his mother was of Russian descent and abstruse studied medicine in Switzerland. King parents were new arrivals enclosure the Spanish-American republic but yell poor immigrants.
Carpentier would adjacent recall roaming in his father's spacious library. Throughout his walk, he struggled to reconcile honourableness two worlds of his childhood: the sheltered European one be beneficial to his home and the livelier world of Cuban blacks tab the street.
The Afro-Cuban Avant-Garde Carpentier's first language was French, extremity he spoke Spanish with clean French accent.
He attended hidden schools, and received advanced tuneful training at a prestigious Frenchwoman lycee as a teenager. Subside began studies in architecture pleasing the University of Havana collective 1920. His education ended suddenly, however, when his father abandoned the family in 1922. Unnatural to leave the university, proscribed supported himself as a newspaperwoman.
He wrote music and the stage reviews for Havana newspapers come first at the age of cardinal became editor of the exotic weekly Carteles. Later, he helped to found another influential serial, Revista de Avance.
By 1927 Carpentier had begun to distinguish living soul as a promoter of glory nascent Afro-Cuban movement, which imported African elements into the discipline.
He
wrote librettos and collaborated beginning the creation of ballets, droll operas, and experimental theater unnerve. Carpentier and his companions judged black culture as a origin of creative and political power, a rejection of European natural. For them, Afro-Cuban art diameter the spirit of rebellion jaunt helped uplift the faith break into black people in their clinch culture.
The political situation in State was becoming more chaotic.
Outbreak was growing against the absolutism of Gerardo Machado y Morales, who had come to dominion in 1925. During a gathering of dissidents in 1927, Carpentier was arrested and held cart forty days. While in dungeon, he began writing Ecue-yamba-o!, characteristic Afro-Cuban novel that would late become his first published work.
Upon his release, he knew he was blacklisted and prep below suspicion. A French poet, Parliamentarian Desnos, allowed the Cuban optimism use his papers to free to France.
The Paris Years Carpentier spent eleven years in Town. Through his connection with Desnos, he became associated with honesty surrealists. He also met profuse Spanish and Latin American writers in Paris and Madrid.
Carpentier continued to write for Carteles and other Cuban publications; realm reviews kept the Cuban usual informed about the artistic coup d'‚tat developing in Europe. He regular published a column on women's fashion under the pseudonym Jacqueline.
Carpentier began to work in portable radio broadcasting as a writer, entertainer, and sound-effects specialist.
Radio don advertising would be his vocation for the next three decades. He wrote experimental radio plays and collaborated on musical programs with avant-garde composers. While without fear was in Paris, he publicised his first novel, Ecueyamba-o! (1933). The book fared poorly rule critics, and he did howl attempt to publish fiction boost for more than a decade.
Carpentier immersed himself in studying glory history and culture of justness Americas.
He was fascinated know African religious and social lex non scripta \'common law, and the way these were transplanted to the Europeanized Land culture. Years later, Carpentier would attempt to reconcile the Country America that he discovered collect books in Paris with selection experienced firsthand; the gap mid them would furnish the topic for his greatest fiction.
The Lacking Steps By 1939, the contigency in Europe was growing mean, and Carpentier returned to Island.
In 1945, he left Havana for Caracas, Venezuela, to stick in advertising and radio. Concern Venezuela, he entered his domineering productive period. His first leading publication, which he had going on to research before leaving Land, was Music in Cuba (1946), a work of scholarship. Impossible to differentiate his attempt to trace loftiness origins of Cuban music wallet the essence of Cuban the social order, Carpentier reaches back to justness first ballads sung by Land mariners of the sixteenth c and to the ritual song of Native Americans as sufficiently as Africans.
Some of the vital features of Cuban music were contributed by the first Country exiles.
Researching this early clasp in Cuban history brought emperor attention to Haiti and cast down revolution. A trip there propitious 1943 brought him face hitch face with the “marvelous real” in the landscape, myths, prep added to history of the Americas viewpoint inspired him to write sovereignty historical novel, The Kingdom asset This World (1949).
This anecdote of Haiti, told largely make the first move a slave's point of conception, sets the values of influence European Enlightenment up against grandeur intensity of Caribbean culture, varnished its supernatural and magical aspects.
Origin of a Reflective Stance About vacations from his busy poised in the metropolis of Caracas, Carpentier took trips to magnanimity jungles along the Orinoco Cascade.
Experiencing both a Latin Land of the future and pick your way of the remote past forearmed him with the reflective round found in The Lost Steps (1953), considered by many secure be his greatest novel. Rectitude novel's narrator, a musician, trip into the Amazonian rainforest double up search of indigenous musical equipment and explores the possibility liberation evading time and casting theoretical civilization.
This allegorical story casts doubt on whether modern gentleman, with his diminished urban put up, can recover his authentic class in any guise.
Carpentier’s famous contemporaries include:
Fidel Castro (1926–): Cuban revolutionary leader advocate head of state from 1959 to 2008.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986): Argentine writer whose works were banned in Cuba under Castro.
Jose Lezama Lima (1910–1976): Cuban lyrist and an influential figure walk heavily Latin American literature who wrote in a baroque style.
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973): Nobel Prize–winning Chilean sonneteer and communist diplomat.
Octavio Paz (1914–1998): Mexican writer, poet, and deputy who also won the Chemist Prize.
Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906–2001): African poet, developer of the intention of negritude, and president late Senegal from 1960 to 1980.
History and Revolution In Caracas, Carpentier succeeded in becoming one dominate the best-known Latin American writers, but it was not effortless.
He was forced to benefit finance the publication of circlet books. A second edition come within earshot of The Lost Steps in 1959 was widely circulated in influence Spanish-speaking world. That year, Country underwent a communist revolution, folk tale Fidel Castro became the nation's political leader. Carrying the text for his next novel worry his luggage, Carpentier returned tend his home country.
He common the position of director all but the state-run Cuban Publishing Terrace in Havana.
Carpentier completed the record of Explosion in a Cathedral and published it in 1962. The book was a reasonable seller and incited much factional debate. It is a true novel centering on the belongings of the Enlightenment and primacy French Revolution on Latin Ground.
It offers a model nigh on Latin American fiction based use the history of the Creative World, expanding on the themes and problems posed in The Kingdom of This World beam The Lost Steps.
After Explosion mop the floor with a Cathedral there was first-class twelve-year hiatus in Carpentier's fable writing. However, in 1964 recognized published a book of essays, Probes and Differences, that difficult to understand an enormous impact on Indweller American literature.
The book republished his prologue to The Society of This World, his fullest statement of the theory assess the “marvelous real.” Invoking grandeur magical presence he found pathway Latin America's indigenous interior, Carpentier argued for a mode attention narration that could incorporate unbelievable elements without seeming artificial.
Sovereignty theory, appearing in the call of the Cuban Revolution see the Latin American boom, composed rifts among critics of justness Spanish-American novel. Probes and Differences also contained Carpentier's ideas haste the baroque style, an meaningful quality in Latin American belles-lettres and in his own novels.
Later Career as a Controversial Figure Carpentier's connection with the mutinous Cuban government transformed him turnoff a controversial figure in Dweller American cultural politics.
While artists and intellectuals became disillusioned touch the repressiveness of the Socialist regime and its dependence become the Soviet Union, Carpentier remained faithful to the revolutionary create, turned his back on comrades who did not, and refrained from criticism about government policies. The Cuban government rewarded Carpentier with a privileged position.
Loosen up spent from 1968 until birth end of his life accent France as a cultural emissary. He was allowed to be given royalties and publish outside authority island, as other Cuban writers were not.
Carpentier's next work was his only satirical novel. Reasons of State (1974) concerns wonderful dictator attempting to rule nobility fictitious Nueva Cordoba from dominion home in Paris, periodically repetitive to his country to authority revolutionary outbreaks.
A tragicomic badge of artificiality, he ends slang with no control over anything. His final novel, The Restate and the Shadow (1979), deference based on the life hostilities Christopher Columbus. Readers find cream that it was by provocative Queen Isabella that Columbus fixed her help, thereby rendering illustriousness entire American enterprise part reminiscent of an illicit love affair.
Carpentier wrote the novel after establish diagnosed with cancer; he petit mal in Paris on April 24, 1980.
Alejo Carpentier grew up in an well-heeled family and received a great education. In his father's turn over, he satisfied his curiosities monkey a young reader with definitive French authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Writer, as well as Pio Baroja, the modern Spanish novelist.
After a long time he spoke French at abode, his association with Cubans suffer defeat African, Indian, and Spanish derivation influenced him as he hunted to combine the European dowel American worlds of his childhood.
The “Marvelous Real” Carpentier's studies pulsate Latin American history exerted unornamented profound influence on his hand.
So did his firsthand journals in the ruins of Country and the jungles of blue blood the gentry Orinoco, from which arose queen concept of the “marvelous real.” In his novels, the continent's ancient past is forcefully attentive, and the natural environment disintegration sentient and magical. Critic Roberto Gonzales-Echeverria, in his book Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, writes: “Carpentier searches for blue blood the gentry marvelous buried beneath the flat of Latin American consciousness, annulus African drums still beat enjoin Indian amulets rule; in rock bottom where Europe is only uncut vague memory of a innovative still to come.” Incongruity challenging paradox, according to Carpentier, junk at the heart of Weighty American life and the “marvelous real.”
Alejo Carpentier probed the tangled history of character New World in his novels, illuminating the connection between honourableness past and present as clampdown historical texts do.
Here unwanted items some additional works in loftiness relatively new genre of Classical American historical fiction:
The War give an account of the End of the World (1981), a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. A novel home-grown on the true story a selection of a religious fanatic and wreath followers, who provoke a non-military war in Brazil in grandeur 1890s.
The General in His Labyrinth (1989), a story by Archangel García Márquez.
A fictional credit of the “Great Liberator” holiday South America, Simon Bolivar, inspect his final days.
All Souls' Rising (2004), a novel by President Smartt Bell. The first installation of an epic trilogy pine the slave uprising in State that turned a colonial liquidation into the world's first reeky republic.
Inés of My Soul (2006), a novel by Isabel Allende.
The story of the dawn of Chile told through illustriousness life of Inés Suarez, smart sixteenth-century conquistadora (female conquistador).
Malinche (2007), a novel by Laura Esquivel. A historical novel based modesty the love affair between defeater Hernán Cortés and his Wild American interpreter.
Fueling the Boom Carpentier's literary theory—and works such orangutan The Kingdom of This World, which put his ideas walkout practice—influenced the writers who created
the Latin American literary boom demonstration the 1960s.
Two notables unaffectedly influenced by Carpentier are Archangel García Márquez of Colombia paramount Carlos Fuentes of Mexico. Opening is reported that upon be inclined to Explosion in a Cathedral, García Márquez abandoned a draft ensnare his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, slab started over from scratch.
Go into detail broadly, Carpentier is acknowledged middle the originators of magical realism.
Although considered grand major literary force in Model America, Alejo Carpentier did pule achieve widespread recognition with honourableness American reading public. Critics be born with asserted that the erudite fabric of his prose—discoursing on much disparate subjects as anthropology, plan, zoology, history, philosophy, musicology, enthralled cuisine—may repel many readers.
Break the rules the other hand, his exert yourself has rated better among Land readers and critics. Both The Kingdom of This World boss The Lost Steps won literate prizes in France. Taken chimpanzee a whole, his writing assay considered without parallel in twentieth-century literature for having defined nobility special role of Latin Ground in global culture and professor mythologies.
The Lost Steps When Carpentier's The Lost Steps was publicised in English in 1956, gladden commanded little attention from English readers, despite the success hold the novel in other languages.
The lack of American come after was even more disappointing, on account of the main character of picture novel is a Manhattan summit who journeys to the item of the jungle in weigh up of undiscovered musical instruments seized by the indigenous people surrounding. The reception from American critics was positive, though it exact not translate into sales.
Mar unnamed reviewer from Time calls it “one of the wonderful fictional forays toward an answer” of whether humans are superiority in modern civilization or importance a more primitive state endorse nature. The reviewer also transcribe that the author “is loving with an elegance of sight and distinction of style,” bracket that despite the lack make famous a clear-cut message, he protection to be “a more satisfying guide than many a extra decisive pundit.”
How cast-offs these studies reflected in ruler published works?
What political issues and stances support out in his novels?
Gonzalez-Echevarria, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim bequeath Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Sanatorium Press, 1977.
Janny, Frank. Alejo Carpentier and His Early Works. London: Tamesis, 1981.
King, Lloyd.
Alejo Carpentier, Caribbean Writer. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies Press, 1977.
Luis, William, ed. Voices from Under: Black Narrative blot Latin America and the Caribbean. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984.
Shaw, Donald L. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
de Armas, Frederick A.
“Metamorphosis as Revolt: Cervantes' Persiles witty Segismunda and Carpentier's El reino de este mundo.” Hispanic Review 49 (Summer 1981): 297–316.
Labanyi, Jo. “Nature and the Historical Enter in Carpentier's El siglo staterun las luces.” Bulletin of American Studies 57 (1980): 55–66.
“To Garden of eden and Back (review of The Lost Steps.” Time, October 22, 1956.
Reprinted on the Interval Web site at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,824548,00.html. Accessed on April 19, 2008.
Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature