El siglo de las luces

The terrible years of the French Revolution and its aftermath were not just a European cataclysm. They were endured by people wherever French rule was supreme. One such area was the Caribbean, at that time a cauldron of competing forces: France, England, Holland, Portugal, Spain, all fought for supremacy in the region, and all had to fight the pirates. Each country controlled at least one island, some had carved out colonies on the northern mainland of South America. Not only were the colonies pawns in this competition for global power, they were also sources of valuable commercial goods for their European masters. Slaves from Africa were the labour force on these overseas estates. The Catholic Church was there too, trying to harvest show more souls.

What use would the Europeans in such a world have for the ideals of "liberté, egalité et fraternité" or for the thoughts expressed in the Declaration for the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? Carlos and Sophia, brother and sister, and their cousin Esteban had conventional colonial lives. They were wealthy orphans on the verge of adulthood, living together in an old Havana mansion, little thinking of the outside world. Into this comfortable haven came Victor Hugues, a mason, Jacobin and French agitator. Here was someone and something new and exciting for the trio, who readily slipped into believing in that better world, without quite knowing how it was to be achieved.

Victor and Esteban wound up in France, somewhat estranged as Victor climbed the ever shifting world of revolutionary administration. Eventually Esteban, a Spanish national, had to flee France winding up in Guadaloupe, an English colony at the time. Victor too soon found himself in Guadaloupe as Commissar, sent by the Directorate to retake it from England. On board his ship was a guillotine, the first in the New World. So began a reign of terror, giving Hugues the sobriquet of the Robespierre of Guadaloupe.

The character of Hugues is taken from history. Carpentier uses him to vividly reconstruct the Caribbean world of the time. When the revolution in France abolished slavery in its colonies, Victor carried out the order. When slavery was reestablished under Buonaparte, Victor, now in Cayenne as Governor of French Guiana, carried out that order too, rounding up freed slaves and reestablishing a market. The plight of the oppressed, slave or free, is a dominant theme in this book.

Carpentier uses Hugues's relationship with Esteban and Sofia to give a gripping account of Hugues himself, a character type encountered all too often in history. His writing is at times reminiscent of Zola, with the detailed descriptions that manage to move the plot forward rather than impede it. Writing of an autumn hurricane: A vast noise enveloped and encircled the house, and the different tunes made by the roof, the window blinds and the skylights combined in a watery concert: solid water and broken water, water spattering, tumbling from a height, spouting from a gargoyle, being sucked into the mouth of a gutter. A respite ensued, but more oppressive, more heavily charged with silence than the early part of the night. And then came the second downpour --...

Carpentier the philosopher can't resist a big "what if?" in Explosion in a Cathedral. In a seeming digression with overtones of magical realism, Carpentier speculates on the timing of a journey of centuries, from the source of the Mother River to the Empire of the North, the Land-in-Waiting:

And then one night, as will always be remembered, a blazing shape crossed the sky with a mighty hiss, indicating the direction which men had established long before as leading to the Empire of the North. Then, divided into hundreds of fighting squadrons, the horde set out, and penetrated into foreign lands. All the males of other races were ruthlessly exterminated, and the women kept for the propagation of the conquering race. Thus there came to be two languages: that of the women, the language of the kitchen and childbirth, and that of the men, the language of warriors, to know which was held to be a supreme privilege.

And then, just when the migrants reached the place where "The fresh water pushes so that the other shall not enter, the salt water so that the other shall not escape", they encountered that other huge migratory invasion: that of the European. "Two irreconcilable historical periods confronted one another in this struggle where no truce was possible. Totemic Man was opposed to Theological Man."

Carpentier was the second ever winner of the Miguel de Cervantes prize, given for the author's overall body of work in the Spanish language. However, writing was not his only artistic medium. He was a renowned musicologist. Although his best known novel in that field would be The Lost Steps, music and poetry make frequent appearances in this book, and can be found in the rhythms of his prose.

The Swiss born Carpentier grew up in Havana, developing a real interest in all aspects of Afro-Cuban culture. He was a supporter of revolutionary ideals, which sent him into self imposed exile to France in the '30s and Venezuela after WWII. However, with the rise of Castro, he was able to return to Cuba where he was rewarded with a diplomatic posting to Paris. He died in Paris in 1980 and is buried in Havana. show less

This is an historical novel in the fullest sense of the term: it works as a novel with a storyline that gives us an entertaining fictional view of events from the past, it brings in extra context from the perspective of the time in which it was written, and it pushes us to think more generally about the nature of political commitment and historical change. I don't know if it was ever available in socialist Hungary, but if it was then I'm sure György Lukács would have found quite a few copies under the Christmas tree the year it came out (do Marxist philosophers even have Christmas trees?).

Carpentier looks at the effects of the French Revolution in the Caribbean by following the career of the French colonial administrator Victor show more Hugues. (No relation to the Notre Dame chap, but Carpentier mischievously finds a reason for him to exclaim "Les cloches, les cloches!" the first time he appears...). Hugues was almost a forgotten figure in the 1950s, but Carpentier became interested in him when he realised that the same person was responsible for implementing the abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe in 1794 and reintroducing it in French Guiana barely a decade later. From the little Carpentier could find out about the early political career of Hugues it was clear that he must have begun as someone ideologically committed to the Revolution - how did he go from being a Jacobin disciple of Rousseau and Robespierre to enforcing Napoleonic directives that went against all the beautiful, logical ideals of the Age of Enlightenment?

We follow Hugues through the eyes of two young middle-class Cubans, the cousins Esteban and Sofia. They have grown up in a house full of subversive books and scientific toys in Havana, and make friends with Hugues when he calls at their home on a business trip shortly before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution. There's a great deal of Candide-like zipping about the region and across the Atlantic in ships as a complicated triangular relationship develops between the three of them, in which erotic bonds are made to compete with political disenchantment.

There are some very beautiful lyrical passages in which Carpentier shows us how the baroque complexity of the Caribbean natural environment and its human history can't be reduced to the arbitrary "rational" concepts of political theory, which are especially represented in the book by the two machines of political power Hugues takes to Guadeloupe: the printing press and the guillotine. Just one example: I was especially struck by the description of a rain shower in Guadeloupe in Ch.XXII, which brings in practically an entire symphony orchestra of musical metaphors.

There are also a lot of implicit references to 20th century history, although Carpentier never officially steps outside the frame of his 18th century narrative. When he writes about Hugues's veneration of Robespierre and his utter disbelief when he hears about the coup of 9 Thermidor, it is pretty obvious that Carpentier is thinking about Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, for instance; Billaud-Varenne in exile has a certain resemblance to Trotsky, and I don't think anyone could read the final chapter without thinking about the Spanish Civil War. Carpentier was of course writing whilst the Cuban Revolution was in progress, so I would imagine there are a lot of references to Cuban politics as well, if you know where to look.

This is another of those books where publishers around the world have had their fun changing the title: in the Spanish original it's El siglo de las luces ("The century of lights", or "The age of enlightenment"), and at least the French, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish and Swedish editions have taken this over literally. The English publishers, on the other hand, were obviously afraid that it would be mistaken for a history textbook and chose the more dramatic Explosion in a cathedral (from the title of a painting that hangs in the home of Esteban and Sofia, and which Carpentier uses as an image of the collision between the Enlightenment and the Baroque). The Germans do the same with Explosion in der Kathedrale, but the Dutch take another striking image out of the text and call it De guillotine op de voorsteven ("The guillotine on the prow"). show less

“You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the show more Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.
Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.
The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.
The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.
They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.
The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.
The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.
A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.
In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.
Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.
Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.
Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.
Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.
When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.
From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.
The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.
The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.
In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.
The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.
Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted. show less

I started this last week, and was so overwhelmed by it that I gave it up and read Carpentier's earlier novel about the Haitian Revolution, The Kingdom of This World, instead. It was fortuitous, because Explosion in a Cathedral builds on the themes in Kingdom. Kingdom focuses on Haiti, while Explosion attempts to encapsulate the effects of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, and beyond. It's a baroque, cyclical novel that explores multiple historical angles and geographies. The hero of most of the novel, Esteban, finds himself often on the periphery, whether he's in the Basque Country which was arbitrarily divided between France and Spain, or in the Caribbean where slavery is abolished only to be replaced with forced labor, then show more fully reinstated by Napoleon. The characters are all exiles, some self-imposed, some forced. It's both a celebration of the work of revolution and a cautionary tale about the failures of revolution. This is usually classified as magical realism, but there's no actual elements of the fantastique in here; it's the writing and the descriptions that transcend to the realm of the fantastic. Like Kafka, there are long run-on paragraphs with no breaks for dialogue, and endless digressions. García Márquez allegedly tore up his first draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude after reading this, but Carpentier eclipsed anything García Márquez ever wrote. show less

As revolution sweeps back and forth across the Atlantic at the conclusion of the 18th century, two Cuban cousins witness a world trembling between rebirth and regression.

Sofia is the most perfect literary protagonist I can remember reading this semester. I suppose you could make a case for Victor or Esteban dominating the narrative, but Sofia is clearly the narrative's center: she is the one who develops a firm and unyielding moral code, and it is only through her that Esteban recovers from his post-Victor cynicism. Even aside from its artistic ambition, Explosion in a Cathedral is stuffed with technical achievements, ranging from how the three narratives (Carlos, Sofia, Esteban) envelope one another to the single point where the show more narrative jumps from Sofia to Esteban. In the leap, the narrative elides a pivotal event so effortlessly that the reader only realizes the omission alongside Esteban a hundred pages later. show less

Havanna, a XVIII. század végén. Sophía, Carlos és Esteban, a frissen elárvult testvérpár úgy élik a világtól elszakadva a maguk életét, mint egy babaházban. Ám egy napon betoppan közéjük Victor Hugues, a karizmatikus kereskedő, szabadkőműves és forradalmár, aki magával hozza a Történelmet, és viharként tépáz ronggyá mindent, ami addigi viszonyaik közt biztosnak tűnt. 1789 szele magával ragadja a szereplőket, akik hol oly közelről, hol oly távolról szemlélhetik így a kort, hogy mit se tudnak felfogni belőle – mégis segítségükkel olyan kollázst kap az olvasó, ami talán többet árul el arról az időről, mint egy Robespierre-monográfia. Victor személyében pedig a maga testet öltött show more Forradalmi Szellem kíséri őket végig útjukon – hol bokáig gázolva a vérben, hol buzgón forgatva a köpönyeget*.

Carpentier prózájában az a fantasztikus, hogy tökéletesen ráérez a posztmodern hagyomány (például Faulkner) és a Karibi-szigetvilág fülledt tradíciója közötti rokonságra, olyan tropikusan barokk szöveget hozva létre, amibe belealél az ember. Ebben a világban még a szegénység is gazdag, mert illatok és ízek és formák milliárdjai veszik körül, amik bódító felsorolások formájában hömpölyögnek az olvasó elé. Itt ha két ember egymásra néz, az már kísérleti atomrobbantás, itt a vér (de még a verejték is!) szebb színben tündököl, mint Kairó bíbor rózsája, itt a szavaknak szaga van és súlya van… És mindezen túl ez egy okos regény is, konzekvens történelemszemlélettel a központban – csak épp maga a szöveg annyira erős és lendületes, hogy ezt hajlamosak vagyunk elfelejteni. Mindent összevetve: ez a könyv a latin-amerikai regényirodalom legszűkebb elitjébe való.

* Victor Hugues karibi diktatúrájának egyes elemeiben néha felismerni véltem a sztálini Szovjetuniót – ahogy a rendszer ősi ellenségei és saját hívei is előbb-utóbb ugyanazon a rothadó fegyencgyarmaton találják magukat; ahogy a „gránitszilárdságúnak” mondott alapelveket felfüggesztik, ha a politikai realitás úgy kívánja; ahogy a Szabadság nevével ajkukon küldik a vezetők nyaktiló alá azokat, akik kiejtik a szájukon a Szabadság szót… Nyilván a párhuzamok nem véletlenek: mindez jól jelzi valamennyi totalitarizmusra törekvő állam igazi lényegét. show less

Here's an historical novel centred around a fascinating topic, and yet written in such a deplorable style that it ends up completely botched.

Esteban and his cousins Carlos and Sofia lead a life rather quiet in Havana, Cuba. There's not much perspective. Apart from managing the family trade, the future seems quite morose. This, though, is counting without Victor Hugues, an eccentric free mason who will barge into their lives and completely transform them forever.

After bringing Esteban in France, the two men will indeed find themselves embroiled into the tumults of the Revolution (1789). Full of Republican ideals, drunk with the ethos of the philosophes, they live here a time that will change them as much as it will change the world. show more Alejo Carpentier tells us here the adventures, from revolutionary Paris to the colonies, of Victor Hugues, who will be entrusted in bringing the Revolution back into the colonies. And, nicknamed 'the Guadeloupean Robespierre', he embodies everything that was wrong with an era, as seen through the critical (bitter?) eyes of Esteban.

More than the biography of a populist egotist, believing himself to be a man at the service of a Greater Ideal, the author gives us to see the storms shattering this last decades of a crucial century, from the political changes and bloody troubles in France (feeding conflicts that will set Europe ablaze) to a revolution that will spread to the colonies, where freedom (very temporary) came escorted by a guillotine, to open up the gates to blood baths and slaves revolts.

It's a vast novel, where each chapter opens by a painting by Goya, and where there is a lot of layers to unfold. And, for someone like me, with an interest in the era and the said Revolution and its impact, here was a very anticipated read! But...

But Alejo Carpentier was adept of a baroque writing style that is, to me personally at least, a style which is nothing but pompous, pretentious, and so uselessly flowered that it too often turns soporific. The plot captivates, fascinates, and is a page turner by itself, but the writing completely shut it down, and, ultimately, makes a waste of what could have been a masterpiece.

Not for me; and what a pity! show less