Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban writer who straddled the connection between European literature and the native culture of Latin-America. He was for a long time the Cuban cultural ambassador in Paris. He was trying to place Latin-American culture into a historical context. This was done via a conscious depiction of the colonial past - as in The Kingdom of This World, and Explosion in a Cathedral (title in Spanish El Siglo de las Luces - or The Age of Enlightenment). His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on - be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture ... Read more >>
Alejo Carpentier - study resources
2 comments:
Alejo Carpentier was one of the greatest wirters of all times and places. He had magical, ucanny gifts. His ability to describe a huge landscape in one incomparably vivid sentence, his contemptuous flouting of all the conventional rules of fiction-writing such as the need for characters to act and think in a "believable" way, his ability to expand and contract the narrative with fantastic effect, his ability to make the reader think hard.....Thees things are not easy to convey; one has to read this incomparable genius to understand what I mean. He was as great as Tolstoy, as great as Dostoevsky.
Well anonymous, that's a bold encomium - but I agree with what you say about AC's literary qualities.
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