Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier, in full Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (b.
December 26, 1904, Lausanne, Switzerland—d. April 24, 1980,
Paris, France), a leading Latin American literary figure,
considered one of the best novelists of the 20th century. He
was also a musicologist, an essayist, and a playwright.
Among the first practitioners of the style known as “magic
realism,” he exerted a decisive influence on the works of
younger Latin American writers such as Gabriel García
Márquez.
Though born in Lausanne to
a French father and a Russian mother, Carpentier claimed
throughout his life that he was Cuban-born. He was taken to
Havana as an infant. The language that he spoke first was
his father’s, however, which left him with a French accent
in Spanish. In Havana he acquired a superb education in
private schools, his father’s library, and the University of
Havana. In the 1920s Carpentier was among the founders of
the Afro-Cuban movement that sought to incorporate African
forms into avant-garde art, particularly music, dance, and
the theatre. Carpentier wrote several opera librettos and
ballet pieces with Afro-Cuban themes, and in 1933 he
published a novel, ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (“Praised Be God!”), in
the same vein. In 1928 Carpentier had fled Cuban dictator
Gerardo Machado’s repressive regime and settled in Paris. He
remained in France until 1939, when he returned to Havana.
In 1945 he left Havana again, this time for Caracas,
Venezuela. The next year he published La música en Cuba
(“The Music of Cuba”), based on extensive archival research.
Using that documentation, he began to publish short stories
with historical background and instances of the fantastic.
This combination became the hallmark of his work and the
formula for “magic realism.” “Viaje a la semilla” (1944;
“Journey Back to the Source” ), for instance, set in
19th-century Cuba, is told in reverse, from the
protagonist’s death to his return to the womb. This and
other stories would be collected in the important volume
Guerra del tiempo (1958; War of Time). Carpentier’s second
novel, and the first to enjoy wide acclaim, was El reino de
este mundo (1950; The Kingdom of This World); it is about
the Haitian revolution. In the prologue to this work,
Carpentier expounds on “magic realism,” which he defines as
the representation of “marvelous American reality.” His
novel Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps), his
best-known work, is the first-person account of a character
who travels to the Orinoco jungle in search of the meaning
of life and the origins of time.
In 1959 Carpentier returned
to Havana to join the victorious Cuban revolution. He would
remain faithful to Castro’s regime, serving as a Cuban
diplomat in Paris from the middle 1960s until his death. In
1962 Carpentier published another historical novel, El siglo
de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), which chronicles
the impact of the French Revolution on Caribbean countries.
It was very successful and there were calls to award
Carpentier a Nobel Prize, something that eluded him. In his
final years Carpentier turned to lighter, sometimes humorous
fiction, as in Concierto barroco (1974; Eng. trans.
Concierto barroco), El recurso del método (1974; Reasons of
State), and El arpa y la sombra (1979; The Harp and the
Shadow). In the latter, the protagonist is Christopher
Columbus, involved in a love affair with the Catholic Queen
Isabel of Castile. Carpentier’s last novel, La consagración
de la primavera (1979; “The Consecration of Spring”), deals
with the Cuban revolution.
Roberto González
Echevarría
