Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist, who influenced the development of Latin American literature, particularly through his writing style, which incorporates all dimensions of the imagination—including dream, myth, magic, and religion—into the idea of what is real. Carpentier was powerfully influenced by surrealism and contributed to the magazine La révolution surréaliste, at the urging of French poet and critic André Breton. However, Carpentier was critical of the mindless application of surrealism; in his work he strove to incorporate the “marvelous”—a version of reality which he maintained was exclusive to the Americas. His novels include El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World,1957), a novel of the Haitian Revolution, and Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps,1956), a fictional diary of a Cuban musician in the Amazon, which is concerned with the nature of time.