[Some] readers may have … decided that indeed the reasons for Carpentier's failure to capture an audience here are those same reasons put forth by the earliest reviewers: that his fiction is too "erudite," that he is more a "cultural historian" than a novelist,… or that he is a "tiresome philosophizer."…

One may quarrel with some of these negative views, but on the question of the absence of a substantial audience for the novelist's work, one flails about like a ghostfighter, firing at shadows, starting at the slightest sound in the woods. What makes the U.S. reading audience so obligingly ignorant of Cuba's greatest novelist? Perhaps the answer does lie in the books themselves. Certainly The Lost Steps for all its superficial affinities with the variety of romantic fiction which North Americans love to indulge in … presents an odd and strangely formidable face to the U.S. reader. Despite its emphasis on the estrangement of the main character from the life of the modern city and the lushness of its sequences devoted to jungle landscape and its exotic inhabitants, it remains an inherently ironic novel whose bite and tension seem lost in its English translation. (p. 16)

One would think that a better fate might lie in store for The Kingdom of This World. Its focus on the 18th-century insurrection of the Haitian slaves against the French colonial forces in the Caribbean offers fertile reading material for both blacks and whites caught up in the present North American struggle for racial equality and social justice. This fact may explain why this novel is the only Carpentier translation available in an American paperback edition. Its relative brevity may also contribute something to its appeal. These factors, in tandem with its adventurous and exotic subject matter—revolution, magic, the metamorphosis of men into beasts—may yet give it continuing life. Still, in a country whose audiences last century praised Melville for his early sea adventures and dropped him when he published Moby Dick, the vagaries of literary taste can hardly be accurately predicted.

An historical novel, Explosion in a Cathedral offers the broadest spectrum of any of Carpentier's works in translation…. Its style is more vital, catholic, and appealing than the other books, and John Sturrock's translation lends Carpentier's pithy amalgam of European and native metaphors and ideas a lustre and excitement some critics have found more appealing than the original Spanish. Carpentier's wedding of fiction and history in these pages stirs the imagination with great force. As the young Cuban named Esteban wades through rowdy scenes of revolution, piracy, and counter-insurrection, or views the baroque undersea creations which crowd the Caribbean sea bottom in mysterious and awesome profusion, the reader may invoke the names of the 19th-century masters of the genre in flattering comparison. This novel cannot be accused of either opacity or pretentiousness, two charges which, perhaps, The Lost Steps might generate. And yet it goes virtually unread in this country. (pp. 16-17)

[War of Time, a collection of novellas and stories, offers readers] the opportunity to see Carpentier at his playful best. In quasi-allegorical short works which toy with the themes of temporal sameness and historical mutability, the Cuban writer rivals in power and execution some of Borges' major enigmatic fictions and shows a face other than that of the dour, heavy-handed historical determinist some of his critics have made him out to be. The novella "The Highroad of St. James." translated by Frances Partridge, depicts a 16th-century pilgrimage to a Spanish shrine which leads to a voyage of discovery, offering the scents and textures of the New World of the Americas as well as a whiff of eternity. It remains one of the most brilliant short novels of the century and yet, among North American readers, as unknown as were the Indies themselves in Europe prior to the expedition of Columbus. Or less so, since not even legends exist about it in our part of the world.

Reasons of State should appeal at the very least to admirers of … European political and social satire … or some of the more recent political fiction from Eastern Europe. Because of the rich, thickly lacquered opera bouffe style, its witty, self-parodying recapitulation of many previous Carpentier themes and rhetorical gestures may not be the best or easiest place for readers new to the style of Carpentier to begin. But this account of the fall of an eponymous Latin American dictator with a taste for French culture and local rum offers a grab-bag of marvellous set-pieces (a rebellion here, a massacre there) unparalleled in Latin American "political" novels since the publication of Asturias' masterpiece El Señor Presidente in 1949. For all of its allusiveness (and for all the allusions it will stir in its readers), it is a marvellously compact work sustained by an uncharacteristic but vigorous sense of humor.

Intelligence and erudition are certainly present, then, in Carpentier's fiction. But so are sex, violence, political uproar, war, revolution, voyages of exploration, naturalist extravaganzas, settings ranging from ancient Greece to contemporary New York City, and characters running the gamut from the simple Haitian protagonist of The Kingdom of This World to the worldly wise, word-weary Head of State, the dictator of the latest novel, all of this comprising a complex but highly variegated and appealing fictional matrix. As many elements of the "redskin" writer as "paleface" (to use Philip Rahv's useful terms for the writer of feeling as opposed to the writer of intellect) exist in Carpentier's fiction. Selden Rodman's complaint that the hero of The Lost Steps is "so very very much the intellectual" does not hold when applied to the body of the work as a whole. (p. 17)