What a spacious, noble view of fiction [Carpentier] has, proposing not chemisms, the darkling plain, the long arm of coincidence, the involuntary memory, the absurd,…, but a vision of the horn of plenty forever exploding, forever settling in bits that belong together more than they don't because there is nothing else for them to do. In Carpentier the All and the One remain unknown, and suspect even, but the aggregate of the Many, gorgeous and higgledy-piggledy, does duty for them, never construable but always lapped up. (p. 5)

Carpentier is a master of both detail and mass, of both fixity and flux. With none of Beckett's reductive extremism, little of Joyce's word-smelting multiplicity, he sometimes seems the only senior novelist today possessed of the view from a long way off: as if, during a sojourn on some noetic planet circling Barnard's star, he had seen mankind plain, and all our thinking, our births and deaths, our myths and structures and dreams, all our bittersweet velleities, rammed up against the anonymous doings of nature…. He is one of the few writers of whom you can say: If we didn't exist, he would be able to imagine us (assuming he was the only human). In other words, he can not only describe; he can describe what no-one has seen; and, best, he seems to have the hypothetical gift of suggesting, as he describes, that his description—a text woven from words—is experience newly reified, made more available, more dependable, and more reassuring, than daily bread or daily trash.

How odd, then, to find critical notices of Reasons of State which chide Carpentier for anachronism or inaccuracy, or which regard the book simply as an exercise in quasi-historical portraiture, or politicist cops and robbers; yet no odder than the complaint, made against his previous novels, that he engages in heavy pondering and actually dares to hold up "the action" in order to think. The truth is that his fiction is ostensible, and his characters … are pretexts. He has something more than narrative, or storytelling, in mind, and he uses it as bait…. What keeps on coming is the deluge of phenomena, against and amidst whose Niagara not only sentences and paragraphs, but mind and will themselves, are virtually helpless. And this is not only a theme in Carpentier's work: it is also a procedural mannerism evinced in thousands of exquisitely crafted sentences which, lovely in distension, threaten to distend further just because everything evokes everything else, and therefore all sentences are unsatisfactory surrogates for The Sentence, absolute and final, which unlinearly would render them unnecessary…. The agon of an articulateness born incomplete; the flirtation with the ghost of an articulateness born complete: these are his preoccupations, much as Beckett's failure to express, aggravating the need to express, is his. (pp. 5-6)

[Reasons of State] is far from exclusively political or didactic: a big buzzing blooming confusion fills it…. The Republic of Nueva Cordoba disarranges and disorders itself like Rimbaud's mind, from stink bombs at the opera to a general strike led by a stereotypical energumen called The Student. The comeuppance is fizzy and satirically epitomistic.

But diverting and amusing as all this is, it isn't the novel's main impact or the source of its perceptual zeal…. Carpentier, transcending satire even while he creates a near-documentary album, conducts us back—through and past matrices, regimes, credos, formulas, and codes, so familiar as almost to seem natural structures themselves—to an atavistic awe larded with unceremonious intrusions. Mind watches mind evolving, and distraction keeps it at full stretch…. (pp. 6-7)

Delving into phenomena, Carpentier finds every sense-datum, every phoneme, a cross-roads, down each fork of which he ponders his way, aware that the time-traveller's very presence modifies the space he's in. That long prose journey from "Now" to "the Looking-glass" exemplifies his way of making something infinitesimal exemplify infinity, something natural counterpoint something manufactured, something almost sacred something vulgar. Yet you can lose the whole thing, responding only to swell's augmentations rather than to swell's meaning, if you don't follow the allusion to Kant which at once undercuts and makes a triumphant finale. The passage is a triumph of style, of course, enacting in its movements—playful, dawdling, side-spill and eddy and full halt—its theme. And this reminds us that style for Carpentier is more than embellishment or panache, but a means of participating anew in the universe through the fixed physical configurations of prose rather than in some unwritten reverie…. Carpentier the impresario of metaphors, the keeper of an entire zoo of assorted specificities, weaves and reweaves complex patterns of transcendence which are like light streaming through a pornographic stained-glass window. (pp. 7-8)

Can we, the book implies, know what it is we do not know? There is no knowing that, but one lifetime's opportunity to observe acquaints us with the beguiling insufficiency of what we do know. As Carpentier proves, no matter how skilled we are at speculative hypothesis, our knowledge of our ignorance is mostly retrospective, except for the big, cosmic questions. (p. 8)