Explosion in a Cathedral
by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with a foreword by Alejandro Zambra.
Penguin, 311 pp., $18.00 (paper)
The Lost Steps
by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with an introduction by Leonardo Padura.
Penguin, 226 pp., $18.00 (paper)
A grim silhouette looms on the prow of a ship: “Door-without-hinges…a meager frame with a set square, an inverted gable, a black triangle, and fixtures of cold beveled steel.” The year is 1794, and a guillotine is on its way to the island of Guadeloupe. In Alejo Carpentier’s riddle-like opening to his 1962 novel Explosion in a Cathedral, the Machine, as he calls it, yawns against the sky like some Deist mechanism or Dada readymade, an Old World construct haunting the New World. Then, with a turn of the page, the reader is in a Havana hothouse drama littered with the “clink of chandeliers and girandoles, fringed lamps, bead curtains, unruly weathercocks.” It’s the late eighteenth century, not the nineteenth, but the overstuffed interiors and bustling exteriors recall a Puccini opera.
In the English-speaking world, the Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier is often associated with magic realism, and while it’s true that his novels (especially The Kingdom of This World, his tale of the Haitian Revolution, published in 1949) inspired Gabriel García Márquez and other writers in the magic realist vein, his own fiction is tonally and conceptually distinct. He coined the earlier term “marvelous realism” and linked it to a notion of the baroque, which he saw as a glorious summit of artistic creation rather than a symptom of decadence. As he put it in an influential essay, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” this style is like Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of suns in cages: a pure explosion of energy, full of proliferating nuclei, abhorring empty space and classical unities.
This goes some way toward explaining why reading him can feel like entering a time machine that’s run amok. The historical novels that make up most of his oeuvre favor the Enlightenment and its ideas, but there are also currents of mid-twentieth-century surrealism and existentialism, Afro-Caribbean legend, Hollywoodesque epic, and Victorian maximalism. His prose—revered and sometimes gently mocked in the Spanish-speaking world—is extravagant, bejeweled with rare words and (issued simultaneously with West’s translation of , from 1953): “Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But that our language?”