Los pasos perdidos

Like all of Carpentier's books that I've read so far, this turns out to be about the contrast between the rich, "baroque" post-colonial culture of Latin America and the failed enlightenment rationalism of the Old World. The narrator is a composer, Cuban-born but living in Europe (or possibly the

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USA - Carpentier likes to keep things unspecified). He has an unfulfilling but well-paid job writing music for advertising films, and is married to Ruth, an actor.

He's just finished work on a film project, and Ruth has gone off on tour, when he gets an invitation from one of his university contacts to make a journey to the South-American rainforest to look for musical instruments used by indigenous people. He's reluctant, but his girlfriend Mouche proposes that they go and spend a couple of weeks together at the university's expense in a nice hotel in the South American capital city and browse the local antique shops for drums and flutes.

Needless to say, it doesn't work out like that, and they have to make the full journey after all, travelling through a succession of zones that illustrate the rich complexity of the local culture, with its intertwined threads of Conquistador, African and Indigenous influence, increasingly dominated as they get nearer to the forest by the astonishing energy of the natural environment. The narrator transfers his affections from Mouche, who turns out not to be sufficiently crease-resistant for up-river travel, to Rosario, a fully-attuned local woman who embodies everything the narrator likes about where he is and, as a bonus, even reminds him of his Cuban mother. And they find themselves in a simple rainforest community, where time seems to have been frozen since the stone age, and where the narrator would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in harmony with nature.

Whilst the Edenic valley inevitably turns out not to be the escape he thought it was going to be, the journey helps him to see the metropolitan world he's been living in more clearly, and understand how futile and tired its cultural themes are without the enriching elements the post-colonial world offers.

This is a full-on symbolic journey through all the senses, where the impressions the narrator gets from the world around him are more important than the concrete events of the plot: it's a book full of scents and tastes and images and textures as well as language, natural sounds and music. Beethoven, Bach, botany, birdsong, 17th century painters, Homer, Shelley, Goethe and Shakespeare, ... even Alberic Magnard gets a look-in. But Stravinsky and Picasso are conspicuous by their absence: Carpentier obviously doesn't hold with the modernists' way of rediscovering the Primitive. Very interesting!

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Well written and smattered with incisive and thought-provoking moments of introspection on the part of the protagonist. The story dragged a little at first but the book is full of very heady, strong images of Latin America.

The Lost Steps is about a man who takes a journey that becomes more than travel to him. Married to an actress who barely has time for anything but the stage, he takes a trip to South America with his mistress with the mission of finding primitive musical instruments for a museum curator. In the

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beginning of the story the man is fixated on making himself happy. For example, caught in the middle of a violent revolution where the streets are riddled with gunfire, he cannot think of getting himself to safety. Instead, he is fixated on returning to his companion for fear she has already (within minutes) taken up with someone else. Throughout the story his priorities change and he begins to imagine the wild landscape back in time, before mankind. His imagination takes him to unchartered territories that are vividly described. Carpentier's observations are astute and he writes with remarkable clarity. The landscapes of South America are breathtaking.

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These were the days for the accumulation of humus, the rotting and decay of the fallen leaves, in keeping with the law decreeing that all generation shall take place in the neighborhood of excretion, that organs of generation shall be intertwined with those of urination, and that all that is born

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shall come into the world enveloped in mucus, serum, and blood--just as out of manure comes the purity of the asparagus and the green of mint. p. 229This was my first exposure to Carpentier and I was immediately struck by the quality of his sentences. He writes a dense sentence, almost wild in its serpentine way, easy to get lost in. It feels a bit like you're in a jungle and the words are vines climbing up your leg. This became especially effective in chapter four, when our protagonist actually enters the jungle... the prose achieved a sort of ultimate mirroring of its content.One felt the presence of rampant fauna, of the primeval slime, of the green fermentation beneath the dark waters, which gave off a sour reek like a mud of vinegar and carrion, over whose oily surface moved insects made to walk on the water: chinch-bugs, white fleas, high-jointed flies, tiny mosquitoes that were hardly more than shimmering dots in the green light, for the green, shot through by an occasional ray of sun, was so intense that the light as it filtered through the leaves had the color of moss dyed the hue of the swamp-bottoms as it sought the roots of the plants. p. 161Though his prose was thrilling, it was also a little exhausting because it never lets up. At times, when I was really tuned in to what he was saying, it was like crawling into the dense undergrowth and feeling completely at home. But other times, when my attention was flagging after a long day, I could hardly concentrate on the complex workings of what he was saying. I had to read sentences over and over, as if grasping for a downed limb.Because here, amidst the multitude that surrounded me and rushed madly and submissively, I saw many faces and few destinies. And this was because, behind these faces, every deep desire, every act of revolt, every impulse was hobbled by fear. Fear of rebuke, of time, of the news of the collectivity that multiplied its forms of slavery. There was fear of one's own body, of the sanctions and pointing fingers of publicity; there was fear of the womb that opens to the seed, fear of the fruits and of the water; fear of the calendar, fear of the law, fear of slogans, fear of mistakes, fear of the sealed envelope, fear of what might happen.The adventure story itself was exciting, but as you probably know by now, plot alone doesn't do it for me. So what else interested me? First: the narrator, aside from the immense prose he writes, is also psychologically a very interesting dude. To me, he lies somewhere in between the unreliable narrator and the reliable one. You can see his pitfalls miles before they come, and perhaps he can too, but he is so good at convincing himself and you, piling illusion atop illusion. But these aren't crazy illusions, they are common ones, about civilization, nature, modernity vs. primitivity, art etc.

What I really found attractive about him was that he was so... malleable, but also so strong inside. At times he seemed normal, not like a typical 'crazy' unreliable narrator with unpredictable moodswings. He is actually quite consistent and sane, but open to being changed by the world, and always struggling to reach a place of well-being, though often in vain. He can be despicable at times, and selfish and unfair, and though he doesn't see these aspects in himself, I think the author intended for them to be apparent to the reader. I don't think Carpentier was painting the narrator to be an example to be followed above judgement, but rather as an example of the futility of our condition in the world--how we can't go back to a simpler state, and how we cannot stay here either in the time of the 'galley master'.The thought invariably struck me that the only difference between my previous birthday and this one was the extra candle on the cake, which tasted like the last one... But to evade this, in the world that was my lot, was as impossible as trying to revive today certain epics of heroes or saints. We had fallen upon the era of the Wasp-Man, the No-Man, when souls were no longer sold to the Devil, but to the Bookkeeper or the Galley Master. p. 9The second thing about this story is that, even though it's straight forward, it is full of asides, tangents, and opportunities for our narrator to muse about this topic or that. These I found highly entertaining and often insightful, and always perfectly phrased. I wouldn't have enjoyed the direct route as much as the one provided here, with all the views and vistas of his mind.Overhead, into the thinning mist, rose the peaks of the city: the patinaless spires of the Christian churches, the dome of the Green Orthodox church, the large hospital where White Eminences officiated beneath classical entablatures designed by those architects who, early in the century, sought to lose their way in an increase of verticality. p. 10

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This novel was written in 1953 but is really timeless and not dated. It is included in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die in 2008 edition.
Alejo Carpentier was born in Switzerland but grew up in Cuba and is identified as a Cuban author. He was also a musicologist. His writing is a fusion

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of literary and music themes. He is considered the first practitioner of magical realism, though is his work is more limited to that later developed by Gabriel García Márquez and was not difficult to read. What makes his writing difficult for me was the music. I am not well studied in music and therefore found that looking up a lot of the works really helped me to more fully enjoy Carpentier’s writing. I found it best to be sitting with my I Pad for quick look up of words while reading The Lost Steps. Music is present in his work, lyrical use of colloquial dialects, literary rhythms such as alliteration and assonance and the theme of music within the world of the narrative (drums, footsteps, etc.)are a few examples. The setting is never identified beyond; a large metropolis, a South American city, a South American jungle. It is a narration of a journey through space but also time. The narrator is never named. Most characters are only identified by what they do rather than names. Interestingly, the women are given names, Ruth, his wife, Mouche and Rosario. The narrator has already grown weary with the marriage and has taken a mistress. While on his journey he grows bored with his mistress and takes a native woman as lover. The native woman, Rosario refers to herself as Your Woman and her name becomes replaced with Your Woman. It is written in the style of a diary. The narrator flees mechanized society for the primordial. The narrator is torn between his heart and head. Does he live in society where he can write or stay in the nature where he is timeless, where he is creative? Carpentier references the Book of Genesis, Sisyphus, Don Quixote, Prometheus, Genevieve of Brabant and Deuteronomy. Though the story lacked something about 2/3 of the way in, the richness of the writing has much to be enjoyed. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to be well read in Latin American literature.

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"What could have been"--"You can never go home again." These are the thoughts in my mind as I came to the end of this book.
The language of this work is rich, and is put to good use describing the jungle scenes of the protagonist's journies. A music composer who works in advertising is married to a

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stage actress, who is always leaving to tour with her stage company. For this reason, so he justifies to himself, he has a mistress. His former teacher, a curator for a museum, offers him $ to go to the jungle to look for primitive instruments. Taking his mistress with him, he soon tires of her.....
Let's just say he gets everything he deserves.

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