Improvised Continent by Richard Cándida Smith

Author:Richard Cándida Smith [Smith, Richard Cándida]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social History
ISBN: 9780812294651
Google: aLUyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-08-25T22:18:44+00:00

Chapter 11

The New Latin American Novel in the United States

Shortly after Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (“The Lost Steps”) had been published in 1953 in Mexico, Harriet de Onís wrote to Knopf suggesting she prepare an English translation. Critics throughout Spanish-speaking America hailed Carpentier’s third novel as one of the most important books ever written in their region. Sales were strong even though the book business was depressed across Latin America. The narrator of the book is a composer living in New York City who travels deep into the interior highlands of a South American country to find an indigenous group whose music had been recorded during a previous expedition. He is to bring back examples of the group’s musical instruments that may well be similar to those the earliest humans made. Given that his mission is to go back to the dawn of human society, the novel proceeds, section by section, as a series of steps back into time: from the spiritually empty but comfortable modernity of Manhattan to the urban chaos of the modernizing capital city in a country modeled after Venezuela, where the narrator arrives in the midst of a bloody uprising against the local dictator. He escapes the capital city for the nearby farmlands and ranches, where people still live much as they did in the nineteenth century. As he travels up the country’s major river into the barely populated interior, he enters an America continuing in the throes of the European conquest, a world that he likens to that of the Homeric epics. Then the narrator plunges into the Stone Age of the continent’s indigenous peoples, who live in a world of pure, purposeless freedom. The hero discovers an imaginative universe promising psychological wholeness to anyone prepared to scrape away everything unessential and return to the purity of origins.

Herbert Weinstock, Knopf’s foreign acquisitions editor, decided to reject the work, explaining that the book was not original and was “an assemblage of highly recondite references to philosophy, music, religion.” He thought that it was impossible for the book to pay back the expense involved in translating, publishing, and marketing it.1 In defending the book against the initial decision to reject, de Onís compared Carpentier to James Joyce and William Faulkner in terms of potential importance.2 Weinstock promised to reconsider if a planned French edition did well.3 The French translation appeared in 1955, and the edition won the Best Foreign Book Prize for the year, auspicious for it suggested that Carpentier was becoming a likely contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.4 Weinstock contacted Carpentier’s agent in France and de Onís to inform them that Knopf wished to move forward with an English version. He confessed, “My often-expressed despair over interesting American readers in Latin-American novels led me to be overcautious in my first reactions to Los Pasos Perdidos.”5

Weinstock’s initial fears that Carpentier’s book would fail proved correct. The reviewer in the New York Times disliked the book, as did several other reviewers. However, overall critical response was positive, and often strongly so.

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