The Lost Steps
by Alejo Carpentier
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alejo CarpentierEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-03
ISBN: 0816638071
Number of pages: 296
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Book Reviews of The Lost Steps
Book Review: A Latin America novel of incredible richness
Summary: 5 Stars
Probably the most remarkable literary event of the 20th century was the explosion--no other word will suffice--of Latin American literary creativity, fully comparable to a similar explosion in the US in the 19th century. And one of the most remarkable creators of this explosion is Alejo Carpentier. Reasonable people may differ regarding who is the greatest Latin American novelist, but surely Carpentier must be ranked among them, and "The Lost Steps" is his most widely read work.
The plot of "The Lost Steps" can be summarized very simply. The narrator, a naturalized American citizen living in New York City, once had youthful ambitions to become a composer. However, he now finds himself earning a living doing musical hack work, e.g., jingles for TV commercials. He is married and also has a mistress. When the novel opens, he has not had any work commissioned in a while and is starting to feel desperate. A friend who is a museum curator offers him the opportunity to go to an unnamed South American country to find a rare musical instrument. The narrator cynically sees this as an opportunity to have an expenses-paid trip with his mistress, but as the trip progresses he feels his dormant musical creativity being revived. He eventually finds the instrument he is looking for. He also meets a primitive, illiterate, mixed-race young woman by whom he is initially repulsed but with whom he eventually falls in love and cohabits with. His mistress leaves him and goes back home. He ends up living with his mistress in a small, inaccessible village deep in the jungle; the only other inhabitants are a native tribe and a few merchants of European descent. He believes that he has now found true happiness, away from the corruption and decadence of modern civilization. He forgets all about his obligations to the museum that sponsored his trip and vows never to go back.
One day his idyllic bliss is shattered when a helicopter lands and he learns that his "disappearance" has become front page news in the US. His wife and his museum sponsors have sent a search party to look for him. He realizes that he has no choice but to go back, although he desperately wants to stay. He promises his native lover that he will be back as soon as he can. When he gets back home, he discovers that he has become a celebrity, at least for a while, but he is miserably unhappy. His pregnant wife files for divorce, and the newspaper that sponsored his rescue now regards him as a traitor and deceiver and portrays him in the most negative light possible. His sources of income dwindle. He is reunited with his mistress but is repulsed by her and wants desperately to return to the village.Nearly a year passes before he is able to attempt to get back to the remote village. Getting there involves a water passage, and he finds to his horror that the rains that have fallen in recent months have caused the water level to rise to the point that the river covers the steps that were his marker for the jungle path to the village. He has no way to return to the village! Shortly thereafter he learns from someone who occasionally visits the village that his primitive lover has married someone else in the village. He is devastated. He suddenly realizes that he was never accepted by the people of the village or by his lover, that he was always regarded as an outsider who was only there temporarily and would never stay. Reluctantly, he decides to return to New York, realizing that he has no other choice.
This simple synopsis does not to justice to the richness of this novel. Even in translation, the richness of Carpentier's prose comes through: his fluency with words, his mastery of sentence structure, his mastery of metaphor and allegory. This is a novel of immense erudition, replete with literary and musical references. One of the novels messages, I think, is to enjoy and savor the peak experiences of life when you can, because they won't last and they won't come back again. Another message is that perfect happiness is unattainable and that most humans need to be content with what they are able to attain. In short, this is a work of incomparable richness that I can recommend unreservedly.
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