Alejo Carpentier
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Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 – April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essay writer, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period.
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[edit] Life
[edit] Early life and education
Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. For a long time it was believed that he was born in La Habana where his family moved immediately before his birth, but following his death a birth certificate was found in Switzerland. His mother was a Russian professor of languages and his father was a French architect. At 12, his family moved to Paris, where he began to study music theory at the lycee Jeanson de Sailly. When they returned to Cuba in the 1920s, he began a study of architecture which he never completed. He also studied music.[1]
[edit] Cuba and exile in France
Carpentier became a leftist journalist and helped found the Cuban Communist Party.[1] In 1927, Carpentier was arrested for opposing the Gerardo Machado y Morales dictatorship and spent forty days in jail. It is during this brief period in jail when he started working on his first novel, later disavowed, Ecué-Yamba-O (1933). This novel is "a superficial exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor of the island written according to the tenets of socialist realism."[1] He was released in early 1928. After his release, he escaped Cuba with the help of poet journalist Robert Desnos who had lent him his passport and papers.[1]
While exiled in France, Carpentier was introduced to the surrealists by Desnos, including André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Jacques Prévert, and Antonin Artaud. He also met Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias, whose work on pre-Columbian mythology influenced his writing.[1] While in France, he made several visits to Spain, during which he developed a fascination for the Baroque.
[edit] Return to Cuba and years in Venezuela
Carpentier returned to Cuba and continued to work as a journalist at the outbreak of World War II. He also began research on a book on Cuban music. He also wrote stories which were later collected in The War of Time (1958).[1] While in Cuba, Carpentier also attended a voodoo ceremony that was to develop his interest in Afro-Cubanism.
In 1943, Carpentier, accompanied by French theatrical director Louis Jouvet, made a crucial trip to Haiti, during which he visited the fortress of the Citadelle La Ferriere and the Palace of Sans-Souci, both built by the black king Henri Christophe. This trip, along with readings from Oswald Spengler's cyclical interpretation of history, provided the inspiration for his second novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949).
In 1945, Carpentier moved to Caracas. From 1945 to 1959 he lived in Venezuela, which is the obvious inspiration for the unnamed South American country in which much of The Lost Steps is set. In 1949, he finishes his novel The Kingdom of this World. This novel has a prologue that "outlines Carpentier's faith in the destiny of Latin America and the aesthetic implications of its peculiar cultural heritage."[1]
[edit] Later life
He returned to Cuba after the Fidel Castro's victorious revolution in 1959. He worked for the State Publishing House while he completed the baroque-style book, Explosion in a Cathedral (1962)."[1] This novel discusses the advent of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution in the New World. It has twin leitmotifs of the printing press and the guillotine and can be read as a "meditation on the dangers inherent in all revolutions as they begin to confront the temptations of dictatorship.".[1]
In 1966, he settled in Paris as he served as Cuban ambassador to France. In 1975 he was the recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1977 and the French Prix Médicis[citation needed] in 1979.
Carpentier was struggling with cancer as he completed his final novel and he died in Paris on April 24, 1980. His remains were returned to Cuba for interment in the Colon Cemetery, Havana.
[edit] Themes and famous works
Widely known for his baroque style of writing and his theory of "lo real maravilloso," his most famous works include Ecue-yamba-o! (Praised Be the Lord!, 1933), The Kingdom of this World (1949) and The Lost Steps (1953). It was in the prologue to The Kingdom of this World, a novel of the Haitian Revolution, that he described his vision of "lo real maravilloso:" "For what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of "lo real maravilloso?" Some critics interpret the "real maravilloso" as being synonymous with magical realism.
[edit] Quotes
- "For what is the story of [Latin] America if not a chronicle of the marvellous in the real."[1]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Adams, M. Ian (1975). Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-78009-5.
- González Echevarría, Roberto [1977] (1990). Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-70417-8.
- Janney, Frank (1981). Alejo Carpentier and His Early Works. London: Tamesis. ISBN 0-7293-0062-5.
- King, Lloyd (1972). Alejo Carpentier: His Euro-Caribbean Vision. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies.
- Pancrazio, James J. (2004). The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press. ISBN 0-8387-5582-8.
- Shaw, Donald L. (1985). Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-6606-5.
- Tusa, Bobs M. (1982). Alejo Carpentier: A Comprehensive Study. Valencia: Albatros. ISBN 84-7274-090-0.
- Tusa, Bobs M. (1983). Alchemy of a Hero: A Comparative Study of the Works of Alejo Carpentier and Mario Vargas Llosa. Valencia: Albatros. ISBN 84-7274-099-4.
- Webb, Barbara J. (1992). Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 0-87023-784-5.
