Customer Reviews

Explosion in a Cathedral

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This review was originally written and posted on my blog at antarcticiana dot blogspot dot com, hence the introduction written from and about Cartagena de Indias. I've posted it here because I consider this a major novel of the 20th century, at least as far as Caribbean literature is concerned.

When you've worked at making a revolution, it's difficult to go back to what you did before. --Explosion in a Cathedral

The people of Cartagena de Indias, perhaps the most spectacular ancient city in the Americas, proudly describe themselves as Caribbean. In contrast, those from the interior, from the chilly, moist highlands of Bogotá, are called cachacos, a term that carries a pale tinge of disparagement. The cachacos are forever outsiders on this coast, where one often has the sense that to be Caribbean is appreciated as more vital than any notion of national pride. Particularly with the Colombian football team in a long, profound slump. Outside of Colombia, few would place Cartagena on a list of the top ten or even twenty-five Caribbean destinations, but Cartageneros are steeped in their own history; the sixteenth century fortifications, the city wall, and the massive castillo dominate the landscape and the psychology of the town, whose people seem not to have forgotten an era when Havana, Port au Prince, New Orleans and Veracruz were connected to it via a constant web of commerce and shipping.

It is a fitting place to read Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier's epic novel, set in some of the farthest corners of the Caribbean basin, in once glorious and gloriously rich cities like Point-a-Pitre, Cayenne, and Paramaribo, places most people today will be hard-pressed to put a country to. Carpentier is one of Cuba's greatest novelists, but I fear I would have been unlikely to read this dense chronicle about the Caribbean aftermath of the French Revolution if it hadn't been for the recommendation of another, Leonardo Padura Fuentes. I've written about Padura Fuentes before; he is a writer whose work and opinions I respect immensely. Googling revealed a 2004 "ten best" list of Cuban novels he created for the Guardian. Explosion in a Cathedral came in at number one. "(T)he theme," Padura Fuentes wrote, "is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions: the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful ideals." This is a loaded observation coming from a Havana writer whose work is characterized by a volatile blend of love for his city with disdain for the entrenchment of petty bureaucracy and the more ridiculous castigations of contemporary life there. Given that he also called the book "the perfect fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in narrative prose," I promptly ordered a battered ex-library copy.

The novel tells the story of Victor Hugues, a little-known Jacobin who maneuvered first to bring the French revolution to the Antillean colonies and then struggled to maintain his power in the face of shifting allegiances back in Paris. Born a baker, he traded in his rolling pin for a guillotine and became a butcher. When we meet him, however, he is a merchant, with interests in Port au Prince and Havana. He has just burst into the young and naive household of three bereaved relatives, a brother and sister, Carlos and Sophia, and their cousin Esteban. He easily insinuates himself into their lives, and ultimately his starry-eyed discourse and brash charisma will seduce two of them. Esteban succumbs philosophically, Sophia more traditionally.

Carpentier conjures up a compelling image of the stasis of life in Havana in the pre-information colonial age. It is a place where the veneer of civility is warped by slavery, ripe for the exportation of the equalizing fire of the French Revolution: "because people here seemed to be asleep, inert, living in a timeless marginal world, suspended between tobacco and sugar." His initial description of the city serves as the metaphorical template for Hugue's descent from infectious idealism into violent pragmatism: "Strangers praised the town's color and gaiety after spending three days visiting its dance halls, saloons, taverns and gambling dens, where innumerable orchestras incited sailors to spend their money, and set the women's hips swaying. But those who had to put up with the place the whole year round knew about the mud and the dust, and how the saltpetre turned the door-knockers green, ate away the iron-work, made silver sweat, brought mildew out on old engravings, and permanently blurred and misted the glass on drawings and etchings, already curling up with damp." Carpentier makes great use of this formal device throughout the novel, foreshadowing the action with ominous sentences ostensibly unrelated to the trajectories of the characters. On the imminent threat of a hurricane, to which Hugue's response will elevate him as a kind of savior of the household: "Those who lived on the island accepted the cyclone as a dreadful meteorological reality, which ultimately none of them would escape."

When the Spanish colonial authorities set out to purge Cuba of revolutionary thought, the strange family foursome is broken apart. Carlos tends to business in Havana, and Esteban and Sophia accompany Hugues as he flees to the south coast and Santiago de Cuba with his fellow progressive, the mulatto vodou doctor Ogé. The Caribbean is in an uproar. Rumor has it that Haiti's slaves are rising up; the fearsome black revolt has begun. Sophia remains in Santiago for safety; Hugues, Ogé and Esteban sail across the channel to find Port-au-Prince in flames. There is no going back to Cuba, and no staying in Haiti; suddenly Esteban, who is really the tortured hero of this book, finds himself in Paris, swept up in events much larger than himself.

Soon, he is diminished. Just one of the innumerable minor satellites orbiting Hugues' rising star as the conquering revolutionary exports the new France back to Guadeloupe, he will bear witness to the all corrupting influence of power as it rots away at his former mentor's ideals. Before long, the guillotine blade is dropping onto the necks of Hugues' enemies with disturbing frequency. Esteban follows Hugues to the next killing fields, the malarial Guyane, not because he wants to, but because he has become a virtual prisoner. When finally he manages to escape and return to Havana Carpentier introduces his grandest and most daring metaphor. Sophia, recently made a young widower and still in thrall to Hugues, years after a fleeting seduction in Santiago, abandons the reunited family to go and join him. Most writers would end their novel with the happy family reunion, but for Carpentier history is bound to repeat itself, and now it is Sophia, as mistress to the iron-fisted ruler, who will suffer disillusionment and witness the latter stages of Hugue's downward spiral into tyranny. In this novel there is no escaping the virulent fever of power and influence.

Padura Fuentes is by no means suggesting that guillotines are falling in Cuba today, but merely by suggesting that we read this novel now he continues his measured, thoughtful, and literary critique of the Cuba he sees out the windows of his home in Havana, fifty years on from another revolution. Here, too, there seems to be some Caribbean common ground.

Fascinating....there is a ton of history in this, mostly about the repercussions of the French Revolution in the Caribbean (something which I'd never really thought about prior to reading this). It centers around the fictional characters of Esteban and Sofia, cousins who are, each in their own way, pulled in to the Revolution and its aftermath. However, both of their storylines revolve around the historical figure of Victor Hugues, a man brought to power in the Caribbean through the tumult of the Revolution. A must read for those interested in the French Revolution, and especially for those who want to understand the Revolution from a different perspective.

This is one of the best novels in the world. Maybe there are some muddy patches in the English-language edition, which is a translation of a French translation, but I think on the whole it transmits the amazingly rich prose of Carpentier, for whom language, history, life itself are all one music.

The overt theme is the French Revolution, though mostly as viewed from France's colonies in the New World. The buried theme is gnosticism, the conviction that things could be different, could be better, that common reality is a sort of veil hiding what we might make of it if we only woke up. The Revolution at first feels like that gnostic awakening, and Carpentier captures that sense of possibility more beautifully than even Wordsworth.

In many ways this novel parallels Calvino's Baron in the Trees; in others, Shelley's epic poem The Revolt of Islam (titled Laon and Cythna in its uncensored version). More essentially, it's like coming into your own in your late teens, seeing how wrong the so-called grownups have let things become, knowing it's for you and those like you to claim and remake life itself - then suffering every horrible, painful, perhaps inevitable setback one would expect such a project to run into on such an Earth. Carpentier shows people whose souls curdle, under this reverse wave. But he shows others who don't, lost selves we might even yet, even now, step into.

Perhaps selves high alive in Wisconsin, in Libya as I write this.

I just finished reading this amazing book, set in the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath, covering a period from the early 1790s until well into the first decade of the 19th century. Its settings move from Cuba to what is now the Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, Guadalupe, Cuba again, Venezuela, Barbados, French Guiana, Suriname, and finally Spain. It provides a panoramic view of the history of the Caribbean during this time period, and in this respect it is as informative as a history book.

The book revolves around three central characters: two wealthy orphaned cousins, Sofia and Esteban, and a roguish soldier of fortune, Victor Hugues, who was an actual historical figure. When we first meet Esteban and Sofia they are just emerging from adolescence, and they age and mature through a variety of experiences until they are well into adulthood. Victor Hugues is portrayed as a totally unscrupulous opportunist who will change his "principles" in a heartbeat, depending on who he may be working for. There are numerous plots twists, making it a moving human drama as well as a fascinating historic chronicle. In this respect the book reminded me of "War and Peace," although in was nowhere near as comprehensive.

So why not 5 Stars? Simply because the book was, at least to me, somewhat difficult to read. I don't know whether the responsibility for this falls on the author or the translator, but I often found the prose dense, especially when the author was involved in descriptions, whether of houses, jungles, or the action of the sea; some of these descriptions went on for pages and pages. Although dense, however, the prose never reaches the level of impenetrability. What I found especially irritating, however, is that throughout the novel there are passages of untranslated French and Spanish, which I had to go to the trouble of translating for myself as best I could. This translation, by the way, is a translation of the French edition which was translated from the original Spanish. Why not commission someone to translate directly from the original Spanish? Go figure. All that aside, this book is an excellent read that I highly recommend.

This thrilling, spellbinding novel is the single most important book about Cuba ever written. The editorial reviews have completely misssed the point. It's a prophetic account of the Communist takeover, set at the time of the French revolution. It describes in harrowing detail the role of the Masons in the fomentation of social destruction that became the reign of terror that has extended into Cuba today. No one who has not read this book has the authority to opine about Cuba.