Carpentier digs into the past; it almost seems as if he cannot get away from it, even in his novel The Lost Steps, which is contemporary in time but is really a search for origins—the origin first of music and then of the whole concept of civilization. Taken together, the elements of the search form a mosaic of the factors that went into the making of Latin America….

Heretofore, the analysis of Latin America, with a few exceptions, has been either superficial or an exercise in patriotics. Carpentier has looked deeper, always keeping a historical perspective. He is particularly attuned to the French influence, which other authors have too often neglected—except as a cliché. Haiti and the French pirates of the Caribbean have been the subjects of two previous Carpentier novels, Explosion in a Cathedral and The Kingdom of the World. In this new novel, too, although it deals with a Latin American dictator, the French element is important, since the tyrant is an ardent Francophile and the novel begins and ends in Paris….

Carpentier's dictator in Reasons of State is a polished man. He is … an admirer of things French and the culture of Paris….

As is so often the case with the well-written story of an ogre, the reader will, upon entering the mind and feelings of the dictator, come to sympathize with him and wish him well as he confronts his enemies. It is the actual reading of Reasons of State that so clearly shows the dangers of the powerful effects of such intimacy. (p. 36)

Carpentier's pathetic Head of State goes down to defeat and is helped into exile with the connivance of the American ambassador. When he reaches his beloved Paris, he finds [himself out of touch]…. There is a "generation gap," which Carpentier shows to be as tedious as ever. The Head of State is, then, a man out of his time, left to decay in a Paris that is no longer his. He dies there and is buried near Porfirio Díaz.

Carpentier has given us another facet to the recent upsurge of interest in tyrants in Latin America. Government is obviously important there: novelists are able to use it as an integral part of their work, in contrast to the rather flat and superficial pictures we often get of governments elsewhere. The recent "boom" has produced a subgenre that has its roots in Homer and Thucydides; it may be that our time-kept literary traditions now have Latin America as their strongest energy source. (pp. 36-7)