Explosion in a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier, Alejandro Zambra Narrated by Fajer Al-Kaisi

Overview

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West's translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” -Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

One of Cuba's-and Latin America's-greatest historical novels, about imperial conquest carried out under the guise of liberation, in its first new English translation in sixty years and featuring a new foreword by Alejandro Zambra

A Penguin Classic

When he arrives in Cuba at the close of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor from Marseille, brings with him not only the idealism of the French Revolution but also its ambition and bloodlust. Landing at the Havana doorstep of a trio of wealthy, eccentric Creole orphans, he sweeps them across the Caribbean Sea to Guadeloupe, whose enslaved Africans he frees only then to exploit them in his fight against the British for colonial sovereignty. What ensues in Alejo Carpentier's swashbuckling, magical realist masterpiece is an explosive clash between the New World and the Old World, and between revolutionary ideals and the corrupting allure of power.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Built around the exciting and timely theme of revolutionary-turned-tyrant, . . . Explosion in a Cathedral is a tour de force.

Times Literary Supplement

Woven into the story is a complete history and geography of the Caribbean.

From the Publisher

A tour de force . . . built around the exciting and timely theme of revolutionary-turned-tyrant.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Penguin Classics has recently published sensational new translations of two of Carpentier’s novels, The Lost Steps (1953) and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). . . . What made them influential, and makes them so dazzlingly readable still, is their style. . . . Needless to say, this marriage of style and subject would be illegible to English-language readers without a first-rate translator, and in Adrian Nathan West, Penguin Classics has found their man.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature. . . . His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite. . . . [With] a sure feel for voice and cadence . . . West lovingly restores the eccentric sweep and florid detail of the novel, better conveying the grandness of Carpentier’s vision . . . West’s translation is sensitive to his humor and irony, and the reader is borne happily along through the thickets. . . . What the reader takes away overall from West’s translation is a freshness and bite and aesthetic ambition that match Carpentier’s.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

“A foundational text of the Latin American ‘Boom’ has at last been translated directly into English. . . . West’s translation is agreeably fast-paced. . . . He is faithful to Carpentier’s ornate style and . . . generally reproduces the gravitas of the Spanish original. . . . [There is] hope that our contemporary re-examination of slavery, colonialism and European liberalism will give Explosion in a Cathedral new relevance in the English-speaking world. Readers . . . should be grateful for this belated new version.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“The most remarkable translating feat I encountered in 2023 comes courtesy of Adrian Nathan West, who in The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral brings the almost orgiastically baroque prose of Alejo Carpentier into glorious English.” —Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal, via Twitter

“In rich prose adorned with magical flourishes, Explosion in a Cathedral . . . touch[es] on still-reverberating themes of discrimination and racism, corruption and power, and the pursuit of self-determination versus the influence of former colonial powers.” —Americas Quarterly

“Thanks to a new superb translation by Adrian Nathan West—the Gregory Rabassa of our day—a long overdue spotlight has been redirected on Carpentier’s literary significance and what Explosion in a Cathedral still has to say about the validity of revolutions and the perils of political corruption. . . . A new translation of this political critique . . . could not come at a better time. The themes of corruption, power abuse, and discrimination seem just as relevant now as they did for the culprits of revolutions two hundred years ago.” —Sounds and Colours

“The beauty of Carpentier’s prose can never be emphasized enough, and here it rises to incredible levels. . . . Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel that . . . has never finished saying what it has to say. . . . Read today, some sixty years since its original publication, at the end of a pandemic, amid wars and totalitarian governments and a radical climate crisis . . . [it] continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world.” ―Alejandro Zambra, from the Foreword

Library Journal

★ 11/01/2023

Supplanting an earlier English-language edition adapted secondhand from the French, West's translation from the original Spanish of El Siglo de las Luces (1962), restores the vivid imagery of Carpentier's story chronicling the promise and betrayal of Enlightenment ideals as played out in the colonies of the New World. Following the fluctuating fortunes of true believer Victor Hugues, the "Robespierre of the Colonies," who proclaims the emancipation of the enslaved inhabitants of Guadalupe while dealing death to counterrevolutionaries via that infernal machine, the guillotine. In the end, the Rights of Man prove no match for the profitable exigencies of three centuries of colonial subjugation, while Hugues's opportunistic privateering rouses tensions between the fledgling republics of France and the United States. VERDICT Juxtaposing engrossing accounts of political and actual tempests raging across the Caribbean with elaborate descriptions of luxuriant decay and the idle trappings of the ancien régime, this lush, erudite period piece by Carpentier (1904–80) brings to visceral life the intellectual ferment and inevitable disillusionment of the Age of Reason, with pungent force. A landmark of Latin American literature.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175902502
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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