User:Tniamath

Alejo Carpentier: the pilgrim at home

Basically, this book is about the life of Carpentier from early formation up to his last works. There are many interesting details about his accomplishments. During the 1930’s Carpentier was known as a journalist and critic. In the 1920’s he wrote articles for Carteles and Social, two weekly journals in Havana. He was involved in radio broadcasting and directed the production of Le livre de Christophe Colomb and Walt Whitman’s Salute to the World. In 1927 he spent more than a month in prison for his involvement against the Cuban dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The year after he went into exile and left for Paris. Carpentier was heavily involved in the beginnings of the Afro-Cuban movement and had two poems published in the Antología de poesía negra hispanoamérica. The Pilgrim at Home details his time in France and his attempts to retain his Latin American culture. One of the main topics is that through his position between France and Cuba, he had the possibility of bridging the gap between the old continent and the new continent. He returned to Cuba in 1939 because he felt he was losing touch with his latin American heritage. Carpentier criticized a lot of the “hybrid writers” that never actually achieved becoming European, but in the process lost their latin American identity. In later chapters, his life is discussed during the time he spent in Havana. In the 1940’s he moved again and resided in Caracas. During this time, Carpentier made several trips to Haiti and Mexico. He wrote and published The Kingdom of this World and La música en Cuba. He started to become recognized in latin America and the rest of the world and was respected as an important writer. Carpentier began to experiment with magical realism and explored the fantastic through his literature. He traveled through the Venezuelan jungle in 1947 and wrote a travel journal called, El libro de la Gran Sabana. The Pilgrim at Home gives us a perspective on the fall of the spanish republic and the beginning of world war II, when many latin American intellectuals and artists left Europe. Carpentier wrote many essays on the decline of Europe and the rediscovery of latin American past. We get a detailed perspective on the research and process of La música en Cuba, telling us the sources and influences that went into Carpentier’s writing, for example Bartolomé de las Casas. Monsieur Lenourmand de Mézy and other characters from *****The Kingdom of this World came from Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description de L’Isle de Saint-Domingue. He explored mixing between blacks and whites, where upper class men would forget “for a few hours the ‘inferiority’ of coloured people”(p.102) and fulfill their sexual desires with the female slaves. His writing is full of “those marginal historical figures, always traveling from place to place in search of better fortune and caught in the entanglements of history”(p.105). Carpentier’s writing contained a large amount of metaphors, oxymoronic adjectives, onomatopoeia, and syncopated syntax, which were all characteristic of the avant-garde. During the 1940’s he deviated from this style and became known for his use of archaic, baroque prose. We get an account of many interviews with Carpentier that reveal his personality as a writer. He would often completely rewrite his novels several times before he was satisfied with his work. He spent long periods reflecting and striving to achieve stylistic perfection. This book thoroughly analyzes the devices and narrative voice in The Kingdom of This World. The protagonist, Ti Noel is described as “merely a passive presence, a witness to a series of events beyond his comprehension, a kind of zombie who, frayed by history, starts to grasp what has happened around him only at the end, when he begins a rudimentary process of stock taking and recollection.” The characters can be simply summarized as parts of a whole. They are destined to act and behave in a certain way during a course of events that they don’t understand. --Tniamath (talk) 06:09, 8 February 2010 (UTC)