Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier (born December 26, 1904, Lausanne, Switzerland—died April 24, 1980, Paris, France) was 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 (Music in 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 Fidel 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 Isabella of Castile. Carpentier’s last novel, La consagración de la primavera (1979; “The Consecration of Spring”), deals with the Cuban revolution.