Latin America has long worn two conflicting masks. One expresses charm, gaiety, sentiment, a mood of comic opera and a long-running belle époque. The other suggests torture, massacres, tyrants, and endlessly trampled constitutions. Are the masks connected? Is the first a consolation for the second? Does the second rely on the frivolous complicity of the first?… [A tyrant in Carpentier's Reasons of State] thinks of Latin American history as an unreal suspension of time….

[The novel questions how tyrants are] able to make themselves so needed, and more important, how is a country to do without them, and to keep their future avatars from coming back? They are the malign royalty of a whole culture, clarifiers of countless fears and hopes and hatreds: hence their fascination even for those who detest them. Carpentier [shares] with other Latin American novelists, a strong sense of reality as fiction…. Reality is full of fictions in Europe and North America too, but I think we imagine the truth can be found, in most cases, if we really need it. In Latin America the truth is often not only unavailable, it is unimaginable, and unwanted…. [A] novel in Latin America, instead of being a fictional imitation of a historical world, or a self-conscious record of the movements of an individual mind, can become an attempt to understand a real world that is all too imaginary by means of imagined continuations of it: the good novels of literature combat the bad novels of life itself.

Even death is a fiction in Reasons of State…. [The] dictator pretends to die, so that people will come out into the streets and get shot down. The frequent and very funny jokes … [are] a way of getting at a reality contaminated with illusion. (p. 57)

Carpentier … is interested not in myth but in history, and his method is to plunge us circumstantially into an earlier period, before, during, and after the First World War. His tyrant is a man of culture. But he becomes, with time, a man of the past, and after a lengthy American-supported reign is deposed in an uprising, also supported by the Americans….

At times Carpentier seems to want to force history into speech too quickly, and some of his dialogues—between the tyrant and a militant student, between the tyrant and a jazz-playing American consul—are too plainly set-ups, frames for talking dolls. But the book abounds with sharp images and sequences…. [For example,] the dictator asked by the American consul whether he figures in the Petit Larousse, and weeping in his downfall "because a dictionary … was unaware of my existence."

This last scene seems to echo [a] flickering sympathy for his ogre-hero, but Carpentier is actually doing something more complicated. When our feelings may be flowing toward the tyrant in his disgrace and exile, Carpentier informs us, very casually, of the man's admiration for Mussolini, then a figure rising in the world. Carpentier wants to turn his dictator into the opposite of a myth: into a historical and human character, mortal, comprehensible, and morally responsible for what he's done. He asks us therefore to perform an act of understanding which I find highly desirable but very hard to manage. He wants us to hold within a single perspective the careless author of futile massacres and the man who cries because Larousse has left him out. Carpentier himself is clearly able to look at both Latin American masks at once…. (p. 58)