Alejo
Carpentier
Cuban author
Source Biographies and Lives
(Lausanne, Switzerland, 1904 - Paris, 1980) Cuban novelist,
narrator and essayist with whom the maturity of the island narrative of the
20th century culminates, in addition to being one of the most prominent figures
of Latin American literature for his baroque works such as El Century of the
lights.
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 a leading Latin
American literary figure, considered one of the best novelists of the 20th
Márquez.
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His definitive consecration as a writer came, however, with
The Lost Steps (1953), a novel in which an Antillean musicologist residing in
New York, married to an actress, is sent to a South American country with the
task of rescuing and finding rare instruments. On the trip he is accompanied by
a French lover, who seems to represent European decadence and whom the
musicologist abandons for a native woman through whom he comes into contact
with the life of an indigenous community, from where he is rescued and taken
back to a civilized city to which he never adapts, until he returns to the
jungle. An abstract and unreal story where the author's knowledge and
intelligence merge with the deepest images of his literary expression.
Later
came El Harassment (1956), after his experience in Venezuela, a short novel
with political and psychological themes, which faithfully reflects the circle
of repression and violence in Cuba before the Revolution, in the 1950s,
although It was not a documentary novel: in this work the episodes occur
coinciding with the forty-six minutes that the performance of Beethoven's
Eroica Symphony lasts.
It was
followed by the volume Guerra del tiempo (1958), where the author brought
together three stories that represented as many variations on time in a past
setting: Camino de Santiago, a reissue of Viaje a la seed and Semejante a la
noche. There were three brief forays by Carpentier into the world of fantasy
and fiction, starring the irreversibility of what happened. Later he returned
to the historical novel with The Age of Enlightenment (1962), set in France and
the Antilles in the period of the French Revolution. In this work he narrated
the adventures of a character named Victor Hugues who brought to the island of
Guadeloupe the ideology of the French revolutionaries and also the guillotine.
A captivating novel that confirmed the visual convocation power of its author,
in which he presents distant characters and environments in the story and
brings them closer to the reader, trapping him in an amazing verbal fabric.
This
famous novel was followed by Baroque Concert (1974), a short work in which he
reconstructed, with meticulous detail and strict historical and musicological
rigor, the journey of a Creole through eighteenth-century Europe, accentuating
the functionality of music in his narrative, since the Book is organized and
structured on musical foundations. The same year he published The Resource of
the Method, in which he recreates the image of the illustrated tyrant, in a
Latin American version.
Chronologically,
The Rite of Spring (1978) is placed next, a novel in which he recreated a story
set in times of the Cuban Revolution and which he had anticipated in the form
of a short story in The Silver Guests (1973). The Rite of Spring shows his
self-reflective process about revolutions, throughout a period that ranges from
the Soviet to the Castro, including the events of Playa Girón, and where the
Spanish Civil War and the echoes of the Second World War also appear. World
War. Finally, The Harp and the Shadow (1979), was a demystifying vision of
Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America through the story of an intimate
confession in which the Admiral, at death's door, decides to make a kind of
inventory. of his exploits and weaknesses.
cradled
within a set that, although simple, is much vaster and deeper.
It is
also worth remembering its theoretical titles, such as Tientos y differences
(1964), Literature and political consciousness in Latin America (1969) and
Razón de ser (1976), essays collected in a volume published posthumously in
Havana, precisely under the generic title of Essays (1984). In 1977 he was
awarded the Cervantes Prize.
How to
cite this article:
Fernández, Tomás and Tamaro, Elena. «Biography
of Alejo Carpentier». In Biographies and Lives. The online biographical
encyclopedia [Internet]. Barcelona, Spain, 2004. Available at https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biogr
With
affection,
Ruben
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