Customer Reviews

Lost Steps

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The novel The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier is a beautifully told story of an anthropologist/composer who seeks to understand the often confusing world we live in. Fleeing an empty existence in New York City during the mid 1930's, Victor travels down to South America in search of primitive instruments and to discover their importance to the indigenous cultures he will encounter there. Venturing deeper and deeper into the jungle, Victor feels as though he is traveling farther and farther into history and farther away from his chaotic life of New York City. The simplistic and peaceful lives of the many tribes he finds deep in the jungle, and their beautiful musical instruments and primitive beats, cause for deep thought in Victor because of the almost overwhelming difference between the world he finds himself in and the world of the United States. This great contrast sets forth an amazing story both of adventure and deep intellectual thought of this time period.
The book will take one on a journey into the depths of the human mind, the streets of New York City, and into the dense South American jungle. Never boring, the book is a page turner and will entice each and everyone who reads the book to travel, think and understand what was going on in the United States during the 30's- both the good and the bad. The book also sets up great discussion between intellectuals who know and understand the study of primitive instruments. The book is beautifully written, beautifully told and is simply great. This is a must to read to let your mind go into the deep jungle and into the concrete streets.

I've read thousands of novels that I cannot remember clearly, and this is one that has stayed with me for more than 20 years. I have thought of it repeatedly the last few months while walking in the woods and observing how the trails change with the seasons (a crucial part of the plot) and thinking about what life would be like if we were cut off from civilization the way the main character in this book is. The theme of this book is as beautifully executed as a classic opera and is especially meaningful if you are a music lover. I'm delighted to know that the book is still in print so that I can easily reread it and give it as a gift to people important to me.

This great adventure novel was first published in 1953 and many of the scenes in this book seem prototypes for others I've come across in Latin American fiction. It is a story of a modern, educated, well traveled man, fleeing from the horrors of Europe leading up to WWII, to the Americas, who is then transposed into a world where the people still live in the stone age, a hidden city in the jungle and a bubble in time.

Our hero & narrator dreamed when young of becoming a great musician, but has long since sold himself out just for the sake of earning a living. He rarely sees his wife, an actress, because they both have busy schedules that seldom coincide. One day a fated encounter with a museum curator he knew in his youth leads him to a mission into the jungle to find and bring back the most primitive of musical instruments and to gain anthropological insights on the origins of music. The musician, who begins the trip with his mistress, ends up on his own cut off from civilization. In the jungle he at last able to find an inner peace and happiness, he finds a new woman, regains his health & vigor and at last is able to release the musical score he has always known was inside him. By the time his wife has a plane sent in as a publicity stunt to rescue him, he does not want to return.

This novel is deeply philosophical, in the end our musician can no longer find a place in either world, and the message is we can't go back, also theories about early humans which have been arrived at only by studying archaeological artifacts can only be flawed, to quote "New worlds had to be lived before they could be analyzed".

Every once in a while I pick up The Lost Steps

and savour it again. Each paragraph is a magical adventure.

Reading The Lost Steps is like taking a mystical journey into the soul of Latin America. Harriet de Onis's translation

captures the magic.

The novel The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier is a beautifully told story of an anthropologist/composer who seeks to understand the often confusing world we live in. Fleeing an empty existence in New York City during the mid 1930's, Victor travels down to South America in search of primitive instruments and to discover their importance to the indigenous cultures he will encounter there. Venturing deeper and deeper into the jungle, Victor feels as though he is traveling farther and farther into history and farther away from his chaotic life of New York City. The simplistic and peaceful lives of the many tribes he finds deep in the jungle, and their beautiful musical instruments and primitive beats, cause for deep thought in Victor because of the almost overwhelming difference between the world he finds himself in and the world of the United States. This great contrast sets forth an amazing story both of adventure and deep intellectual thought of this time period.
The book will take one on a journey into the depths of the human mind, the streets of New York City, and into the dense South American jungle. Never boring, the book is a page turner and will entice each and everyone who reads the book to travel, think and understand what was going on in the United States during the 30's- both the good and the bad. The book also sets up great discussion between intellectuals who know and understand the study of primitive instruments. The book is beautifully written, beautifully told and is simply great. This is a must to read to let your mind go into the deep jungle and into the concrete streets.

Unfulfilled by writing commissioned film scores and disillusioned by the pretence and vacuity of his life in New York, a composer takes up an offer to go to the Amazon jungle to look for the rudimentary musical instruments that would provide evidence of a theory about the origin of music that he had developed as a student. The original plan of taking the money and his lover and defrauding the university so that they could enjoy an extended holiday in South America goes badly wrong when they unexpectedly get caught up in a revolution there and are forced into the jungle. Travelling at first with his mistress from New York and then with a mestizzo lover taken up along the way, the book describes in wonderful Baroque prose the awesome scale and sense of time reversal that he experiences in his dark, dripping travels into a world of perpetual greenness. He senses that he is retracing the steps of humanity. Finally, deep in the jungle he is faced with having to make an almost mystical choice about his life and life work. The `simple' life is uncompromisingly portrayed in its pitiless and raw brutality and yet somehow the `noble savage' still retains the essence of humanity, a survivor in the natural world stripped of the worthless accoutrements and gadgets of modern life. This is at once adventure, allegory, love story, morality tale, and academic tract, but above all it is storytelling at its majestic best, a minor masterpiece of post-war literature.

Carpentier was the first writer to coin the phrase `magical realism' where myths, fables and religion are interwoven into narratives without faithful adherence to time or reality. The form is taken to its extreme in Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, and these two authors remain magical realism's most accomplished exponents. Although the style has influenced writers worldwide, for me it doesn't seem to work beyond Latin America.

Probably the most remarkable literary event of the 20th century was the explosion--no other word will suffice--of Latin American literary creativity, fully comparable to a similar explosion in the US in the 19th century. And one of the most remarkable creators of this explosion is Alejo Carpentier. Reasonable people may differ regarding who is the greatest Latin American novelist, but surely Carpentier must be ranked among them, and "The Lost Steps" is his most widely read work.

The plot of "The Lost Steps" can be summarized very simply. The narrator, a naturalized American citizen living in New York City, once had youthful ambitions to become a composer. However, he now finds himself earning a living doing musical hack work, e.g., jingles for TV commercials. He is married and also has a mistress. When the novel opens, he has not had any work commissioned in a while and is starting to feel desperate. A friend who is a museum curator offers him the opportunity to go to an unnamed South American country to find a rare musical instrument. The narrator cynically sees this as an opportunity to have an expenses-paid trip with his mistress, but as the trip progresses he feels his dormant musical creativity being revived. He eventually finds the instrument he is looking for. He also meets a primitive, illiterate, mixed-race young woman by whom he is initially repulsed but with whom he eventually falls in love and cohabits with. His mistress leaves him and goes back home. He ends up living with his mistress in a small, inaccessible village deep in the jungle; the only other inhabitants are a native tribe and a few merchants of European descent. He believes that he has now found true happiness, away from the corruption and decadence of modern civilization. He forgets all about his obligations to the museum that sponsored his trip and vows never to go back.

One day his idyllic bliss is shattered when a helicopter lands and he learns that his "disappearance" has become front page news in the US. His wife and his museum sponsors have sent a search party to look for him. He realizes that he has no choice but to go back, although he desperately wants to stay. He promises his native lover that he will be back as soon as he can. When he gets back home, he discovers that he has become a celebrity, at least for a while, but he is miserably unhappy. His pregnant wife files for divorce, and the newspaper that sponsored his rescue now regards him as a traitor and deceiver and portrays him in the most negative light possible. His sources of income dwindle. He is reunited with his mistress but is repulsed by her and wants desperately to return to the village.Nearly a year passes before he is able to attempt to get back to the remote village. Getting there involves a water passage, and he finds to his horror that the rains that have fallen in recent months have caused the water level to rise to the point that the river covers the steps that were his marker for the jungle path to the village. He has no way to return to the village! Shortly thereafter he learns from someone who occasionally visits the village that his primitive lover has married someone else in the village. He is devastated. He suddenly realizes that he was never accepted by the people of the village or by his lover, that he was always regarded as an outsider who was only there temporarily and would never stay. Reluctantly, he decides to return to New York, realizing that he has no other choice.

This simple synopsis does not to justice to the richness of this novel. Even in translation, the richness of Carpentier's prose comes through: his fluency with words, his mastery of sentence structure, his mastery of metaphor and allegory. This is a novel of immense erudition, replete with literary and musical references. One of the novels messages, I think, is to enjoy and savor the peak experiences of life when you can, because they won't last and they won't come back again. Another message is that perfect happiness is unattainable and that most humans need to be content with what they are able to attain. In short, this is a work of incomparable richness that I can recommend unreservedly.

In this book, a Latin-American seeks to flee Europe for what he considers his roots. It is very important that we not confuse the narrator with the author. One of the author's many messages is that this kind of return to one's roots is impossible. The author subtly makes fun of his narrator to illustrate this. The tragedy of the book is that there is no escape for us into another culture, flawed as our culture may be.

May I say that I was assigned to read this book in a comparative literature course at Berkeley over thirty years ago, but managed to avoid getting any more than the most superficial impression of it. But, hey; those were the sixties!

My professor thought that this was an outstanding example of 20th century Latin-American literature, and I believe it is considered a classic. It is a book well-worth trying. Do not be frightened by the continued use of unfamiliar musical terms to express metaphors.

First, anyone who criticizes this book for being pretentious and somehow hypocritical COMPLETELY misunderstands it. The irony that permeates almost all of the narrator's criticisms should be enough to tell you that this is not the case. The main theme of the work is the futility of the human will before the passage of time, amongst other subthemes that are wonderfully woven in. This is an absolutely beautiful book whose power brought me to tears a few times. I've read both the spanish and english versions and Onis's translation is very very well done-almost to the point that I enjoy her version more than the original. But, anyway, pick up this book, you won't be disappointed I promise you.

Make no mistake, this is difficult reading. There were times when I wanted to put the book down because the narrator becomes so tedious. But I completely feel that it was worth it. By the end, I cared about the characters and felt that I had accompanied the narrator on his spiritual journey. I loved it and might actually read it again in the future. (I am not going to make specific comments on the novel's content because it seems that other reviewers have already taken care of that task)

In response to some reviewers who had a problem with "pretentious" or "jaded" discourse of the narrator, I believe that this novel would not have the same meaning without such a narrator. He is constantly thinking that he has found the key to life or a secret to solving all of his problems--principally by returning to a simpler life--, but the narration shows his complete inability to do that (even when he thinks that he has). In the end of the novel he addresses this, saying that such a simple life (i.e. the prehistoric, Enochian time period of Santa Mónica de los Venados) is not meant to be intellectualized but rather experienced. The narrator is incapable of this kind of life, and his world view often clashes with it. If the narration were less complex, this truth would be less apparent, as it would not achieve such a stark contrast with the simplicity of its surroundings.

Also, another note about the style: This novel was written in Spanish. In Spanish, the concept of a run-on sentence does not exist and Carpentier exploits this. If you don't like run-on sentences or intellectual "Baroque" style narration, then this may not be the book for you.

Favorite quotes (if nothing else, Carpentier's phrases are beautiful when he's not filling them when obscure references):

"Un día, los hombres descubrirán un alfabeto en los ojos de las calcedonias, en los pardos terciopelos de la falena, y entonces se sabrá con asombro que cada caracol manchado era, desde siempre, un poema."

"Casarse es caer bajo el peso de leyes que hicieron los hombres y no las mujures" (especially after I had found the narrator horribly sexist)