Ana’s fifth chunk
Alejo Carpentier. Los pasos perdidos. 1953. 3rd Ed. Madrid: Alianza editorial, 2014.
−−. The Lost Steps. Tran. Harriet De Onís. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Print.
In the novel The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier, the protagonist (and narrator) travels to an unspecified country in South America with his mistress in search of a primitive instrument. The adventure is spearheaded by the mistress, Mouche, and also serves as an opportunity for the protagonist, a composer, to liberate himself from an unhappy marriage back home and reignite his professional career in music. Upon arriving to the new country, the traveler notices that his surroundings appear to be “the remains of lost civilizations” (Carpentier 1976: 126). Carpentier takes his readers on a trip from a metropolitan city to a jungle and along the way encounters lust, anger, rejuvenation, misogyny, discovery, and lost. The novel, set on the backdrop of the early twentieth century French surrealist movement led by André Breton, is a response to the latter’s collection of critical essays by the same title in French, Les Pas perdus (1917-1923). Carpentier, introduced to French Surrealism after arriving in Paris in 1928, experiences intellectual disillusionment in France after being instructed to view the marvels of Latin America from Europe. Born in Cuba and raised by a French father and a Russian mother, Carpentier writes The Lost Steps (1953) and The Kingdom of This World (1949) as a rejection to the French Surrealist movement and marks the term “the real marvelous”, the phrase he coined to describe his view of Latin America and its history from within the region and not from without. Throughout the story, the protagonist is unhappy with his avant-garde stage-actress wife Ruth, struggles with his intellectual mistress Mouche, and condemns his local love interest Rosario, which all represent the narrator’s perpetual misogynistic undertones that resemble the protagonist’s own personal and professional strife. As he travels further and further into the interior of the tropical country, he encounters modern-day colonial evangelizers and conquistadores, twentieth-century political upheaval, and the beauty of virginal Latin American landscapes. After his trip, the protagonist returns home to the metropolis and divorces his wife. Upon arriving and reminiscing about the joy he felt back in the jungle, he decides to return to the tropical country only to find that his local lover, Rosario, has married and many of the previous inhabitants and landmarks of the regions are no longer there. The Lost Steps along with The Kingdom of this World, mark Carpentier’s legacy as the founder of “the real marvelous”, a precursor and debatably a rejection to its concurrent style: magical realism.
globecultureform 