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Authors: Alejo Carpentier

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Reasons of State

BOOK: Reasons of State
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PRAISE FOR ALEJO CARPENTIER
AND
REASONS OF STATE

“Alejo Carpentier transformed the Latin American novel … He took the language of the Spanish baroque and made it imagine a world where literature does not imitate reality but, rather, adds to reality … We are all his descendants.”


CARLOS FUENTES

“[Carpentier is] one of the great novelists of the Spanish language.”


MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

“ ‘Magical realism,’ made famous by García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, was primarily Carpentier’s invention … Carpentier, except for Borges, is clearly the genius of Latin American fiction in its great period, during the second half of the twentieth century.”


HAROLD BLOOM

“Mr. Carpentier’s writing has the power and range of a cathedral organ on the eve of the Resurrection.”


THE NEW YORKER

“[
Reasons of State
is] a jocular view of imaginative idealism, repressive power and burgeoning revolution, all done with breezy panache. Once again, Carpentier has shown how canny and adept a practitioner he can be in mediating between the many realms which his own life has touched upon. I wonder what Fidel thinks of his emissary’s
Reasons of State
.”


THE NEW YORK TIMES

“The question asked by both of these remarkable novels [Carpentier’s
Reasons of State
and Gabriel García Márquez’s
The Autumn of the Patriarch
] is, how were these men able to make themselves so needed, and more important, how is a country to do without them, and to keep their future avatars from coming back? They are the malign royalty of a whole culture, clarifiers of countless fears and hopes and hatreds: hence their fascination even for those who detest them.”


MICHAEL WOOD
,
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS


Reasons of State
is the slow, sarcastic exploration of the exercise of power—a power inevitably bastardized, secondary, illusory—in a misdeveloped continent.”


ARIEL DORFMAN

“Carpentier’s energy is gigantic and pell-mell, sweeping colossi on top of each other with ruthless, contemptuous daring.”


THE YALE REVIEW

REASONS OF STATE

ALEJO CARPENTIER
(1904–1980) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of a French architect and a Russian-language teacher. When he was eight years old, the family moved to Cuba. Carpentier studied architecture at the University of Havana, but he left school and began to work as a political and cultural critic to support his mother after his parents’ marriage broke up. He soon became a founding member of
Revista de Avance
, a magazine devoted to the avant-garde, and his involvement in leftist groups that resisted the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales led to his arrest in 1927. After his release, he escaped to Paris and spent the next eleven years there, immersing himself in the Surrealist movement and writing his first novel,
Écue-Yamba-O
, an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor. He also pursued his interests in music and anthropology, which resulted in 1946 in a magisterial ethnomusicological study,
La Música en Cuba
, the first history of the mixed origins of Cuban music. He spent time in Venezuela and Haiti, the inspiration for his novel
The Kingdom of This World
, in whose introduction he laid out his theory of
lo real maravilloso
, the origins of “magical realism.” In 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, Carpentier moved back to his home country to serve in a number of official positions, including Director of the Cuban State Publishing House and Professor of the History of Culture at the University of Havana. In 1966, Carpentier returned to Paris as the Cuban cultural attaché and remained there until his death.

FRANCES PARTRIDGE
(1900–2004) was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a writer, and a translator from French and Spanish.

STANLEY CROUCH
is a novelist, essayist, and jazz critic whose books include
Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing
and
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the
Neversink.
Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much
.


HERMAN MELVILLE,
WHITE JACKET

REASONS OF STATE

First published under the title
El Recurso del Metodo
by siglo veintiuno editores, s.a. Mexico, Madrid, and Buenos Aires
Copyright © 1974 by siglo XXI editores, s.a.
Copyright © 1974 by siglo XII argentina editores, s.a
Translation copyright © 1976 by Victor Gollanez Ltd
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Stanley Crouch

First Melville House printing: October 2013

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

and

8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT

mhpbooks.​com
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@melville​house

eISBN: 978-1-61219-280-2

Design by Christopher King

A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

v3.1

To Lilia

Contents
GRAND ALLUSION
BY STANLEY CROUCH

Alejo Carpentier transformed the Latin American novel. He transcended naturalism and invented magical realism. He took the language of Spanish baroque and made it imagine a world where literature does not imitate reality but, rather, adds to reality … We owe him the heritage of a language and an imagination. We are all his descendants
.


CARLOS FUENTES

The novelist makes no great issue of his ideas. He is an explorer feeling his way in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence. He is fascinated not by his voice but by a form he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his dream become part of his work …

The writer inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, of his country, on the map of the history of ideas
.


MILAN KUNDERA

Reasons of State
is a magisterial novel that raises ideas and passions about time, seamlessly converting them into mythic fact. I first had my coat pulled about it by Enrique Fernandez, a low-keyed critic and writer who was then either in possession of or working on a doctorate. We met at
The Village
Voice
, headquartered in Manhattan, back during the time now thought of as the
Voice’s
good years, roughly three decades from the middle 1950s to its final period of occasional depth and quality, the 1980s. Even so, that is as dubious a description of a “counterculture” newspaper as “the good years” is of the Third Reich that Borges was not impressed by—long before the removed literary sect that this grand inquisitor of a world-class librarian
supposedly
represented, because Borges stood apart through his accurate awareness, his tendency to ongoing study, his rejection of simplemindedness. Way down yonder in Argentina, this was a man who clearly saw the blood on that tragically warlike and naive German entity led by an imperial Austrian who loved to savagely flash his pure white Aryan teeth.

Fernandez was not taken in by much of the
Voice
because he was not opposed to adulthood or growing up, but he was as responsible for this essay as any that I was lucky enough to hear as well as I could, during an influential and heated learning time, one in which intelligence, discernment, and any attempt to understand life through reading the best books was in a photo-finish with the adolescent drives that seem to permanently have a good chance to stand in the United States, either in its academy or in a homemade lynch mob, because of a confusion between overly or underrespecting the aristocracy and the common people.

This confusion is usually undisputed as a
version
of freedom. It can be defended as such while throwing eggs and rocks over the barricades, missiles that are supposed to be taken as the released birds of the revered leaders who had risen from the mud, purportedly glistening with blood and scars from their ennobling wounds: they were then floating, willy-nilly, atop the surge of hypnotic chaos indifferently threatening us all, worldwide. Call it what you would, those years were like a
return to the mad years following the fall of Louis and Marie Antoinette. Deep blues turned her hair gray, that last mile soiled by eruptions from her terrified stomach as she rolled in a cart on the Parisian thoroughfare not far from the guillotine. But the former immigrant queen was permitted, by her guards—obviously sympathetic servants of the people, and easily appreciated in the era of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers—to relieve herself against a wall.

BOOK: Reasons of State
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