Alejo Valmont Carpentier (kahr-pehn-TYAYR) is a seminal figure in the development of twentieth century Latin American literature. A perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Carpentier ranks with Miguel Ángel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges as one of the major influences on the emergence and international recognition of the Latin American novelist in the second half of the twentieth century. Carpentier was born in Havana, Cuba, on December 26, 1904, the son of Jorge Julian Carpentier, a French architect, and Lina Valmont, a Russian language teacher. His parents had emigrated from France to Cuba two years earlier. They were convinced that Cuba, independent as a result of the Spanish-American War, was a place to create a future away from the world-weariness of the European continent. Both were fluent in Spanish; both were amateur musicians. Consequently, young Alejo was reared to be completely bilingual and with a knowledge and passion for music which permeated every aspect of his later intellectual and artistic life.
Asthmatic as a child, Carpentier spent his early school years divided equally between Havana and the rural outskirts of the city, where early direct contact with African elements of Cuban society was to have a lasting influence on his understanding of his country’s (and the Caribbean’s) rich and complex cultural identity. His first attempts at writing date from 1916. Throughout his teens, until his registration as a student of architecture at the University of Havana in 1922, he produced stories imitative of his (and his father’s) favorite French and Spanish authors: Alexandre Dumas, père, Honoré de Balzac, Anatole France, Pío Baroja, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.
Forced into full-time employment by the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Carpentier left the university after one year of study to begin a career in journalism. Following a brief trip to Paris, where he absorbed many of the new artistic developments of postwar Europe (represented by the works of writer James Joyce, artist Pablo Picasso, and composer Igor Stravinsky), he returned to Havana and enthusiastically embraced avant-garde cultural groups and supported movements of social and political protest. In 1926, after a trip to Mexico and a meeting with the revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, Carpentier signed a manifesto denouncing the regime of the Cuban dictator, Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925-1933). The following year, he was imprisoned for political activities. In prison, he wrote the draft of his first novel, ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (Lord, praised be thou!), a historically important narrative (thematically and stylistically) in the development of the Afro-Cuban movement of the 1930’s. A unique synthesis of armchair anthropology, social criticism, and formal experimentalism, the novel’s final version was not completed and published until 1933 in Madrid. Fearing for his safety, Carpentier went into exile upon his release from prison in 1927, spending the next eleven years (from 1928 to 1939) in France. There he wrote, developing his craft and increasing his knowledge of new tendencies in the arts, particularly music and literature; he also met many of the leading poets and painters of the Surrealist movement, exploring their theories and techniques while reading, he later said, “everything I could about America, from the letters of Columbus to the writers of the eighteenth century” in order to discover the “contexts” and the “essences” of Latin America.
From 1939, the year of his return to Cuba, to 1945, Carpentier’s creative energy was divided equally among music research, writing, and traveling. In 1946, he moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and the fruits of this earlier period began to appear: in 1946, Music in Cuba, the first attempt at a systematic, historical survey of Cuban music from its colonial origins through the twentieth century (a study to which all Carpentier’s subsequent writings are, to some degree, indebted); in 1949, The Kingdom of This World, a novel of the Haitian revolution inspired by a visit to that tiny Caribbean country in 1943; and in 1953, his most universally acclaimed (and most autobiographical and personal) novel, The Lost Steps. In the preface to The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier wrote that the trip to Haiti which had inspired the novel also revealed to him the fantastic nature of the Caribbean and the South American continent and of their history: “What is the whole history of America but a chronicle of the marvellous-real?” In The Lost Steps, the alienated writer-composer protagonist undertakes a journey from North America to a South American jungle in search of indigenous, primitive musical instruments. He discovers, however, that magical dimension Carpentier called lo real-maravilloso: “the marvellous reality” of South America, where different stages of the human past and different levels of humanity’s cultural evolution coexist in a natural, telluric grandeur which resists description from outside by an old or inherited cultural perspective. In The Lost Steps, the most persistent and characteristic thematic concerns and stylistic devices of Carpentier’s later works can be found: music, architecture, mythology, and the circular nature of time, to name a few.
In 1956, Carpentier published Manhunt, a short novel which, like The Lost Steps, reveals his fascination with the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. War of Time, an important collection of stories exploring the ambiguous and complex nature of temporal experience, was published in 1958, and in 1959, the year of the Cuban revolution, Carpentier returned to Cuba with the almost completed manuscript of his second most acclaimed novel, Explosion in a Cathedral. Published in 1962, the year Carpentier was appointed director of the Cuban National Publishing House, Explosion in a Cathedral is an intriguing, complex attempt to dramatize the impact of the French Revolution on the entire Caribbean and to reveal how, more often than not, the painful and costly process of abrupt social transformation brings about in the end feelings of frustration and disillusionment. In 1966, Carpentier was removed from his directorship and appointed Cuban cultural attaché in Paris. From 1966 to 1980, he continued to produce essays and novels in which his principal social and artistic concerns were explored. Critics at times attacked his work for being too “essayistic,” for having too little psychological development of characters, for the ornate and complex style of his language (Carpentier called it “baroque”), and for his political allegiance to the Fidel Castro regime. Despite hostile assessments from both the political Right and the political Left, however, international recognition of his importance continued to grow during this period. In 1975, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana and the Alfonso Reyes Prize for Literature by the Mexican government. In 1976, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the University of Kansas, and in 1978, he received Spain’s highest literary award, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, from King Juan Carlos in Madrid.
Carpentier’s work now enjoys universal praise. His importance to thematic expansion and technical innovation in the Latin American narrative has been acknowledged by world-famous novelists such as Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, and Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel laureate. His position as a major novelist of the twentieth century is assured and is reflected in the constantly increasing number of translations of his works.