From the point of view of strictly revolutionary literary ethics ["Explosion in a Cathedral"] was a curiously evasive achievement, dramatizing as it did the contradictory allegiances between private sensibility and public ideology. The two principal characters found themselves driven either toward a lucid, contemplative humanism or a draconian revolutionary spirit formed under the inevitable shadow and example of Saint-Just. Though it was set in the Antilles of the 18th century, most readers took the setting for what it is—pure Zanuck cum Goldwyn. "Explosion in a Cathedral" was the book of a writer who found himself to be an ambiguous if not anguished witness to the first years of a revolution in the here and now….

["Reasons of State"] is variously set in the Paris of the teens and the twenties, and at the same time in a mythical country of a distinctly Central American stripe called Nueva Córdoba…. The declining tyrant (who remains nameless throughout) seems to be modeled on a few of those horrific dictators of the past—the "educated tyrant," as Carpentier calls them….

In the long and not especially interesting history of literature and revolution, one thing can be said—politics and comedy rarely mix. Carpentier's earlier novels and stories were often pretty heavy going, what with their tiresome philosophizing and heavily laid-on historical panoplies. "Reasons of State" is something different—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. (p. 51)