[In the following review, Keates assesses the thematic and stylistic features of Concierto barroco, calling the work "a notable exemplar" of Latin American narrative.]

The Latin American novel is nothing if not self-conscious. As if seated at a dressing-table mirror, it tries on any number of hats, jewels, scarves and masks, shifting this way and that for the sake of yet another flattering attitude. There are moments when we long for it to forsake its overblown mannerist brilliance, its little asides and look-at-me allusions for something drab and homely. Now and then it contrives a feint in the direction of gloomy sincerity, but the lure of imaginative trapeze acts and stylistic decor is nearly always triumphant.

Even if Alejo Carpentier were not already famous as one of the most elegantly poetic exponents of this fictional strain, Concierto barroco, which was first published in 1977, would still rank as a notable exemplar of the genre at its most whimsical. Its very opening is typical: a series of patterned syntactical inversions is used to evoke a vision of the gorgeous household plate of an eighteenth-century Mexican aristocrat as it is being packed away against his departure for Europe.

The nobleman, attended by his negro slave Filomeno, fetches up in Venice, where it is, somehow inevitably, the carnival season, allowing paragraphs full of impacted adjectives, serried participles, veritable goods-trains of noun phrases, the grammatical overkill used so relentlessly in novels of this kind to drown the reader in descriptive opulence.

Dressed appropriately as Montezuma, the nobleman meets Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti and Handel in a café. The latter is triumphant from the success of his Agrippina at the Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo but disgusted by the behaviour of the audience, eating oranges, taking snuff and "fornicating in the mezzanine". Adjourning to the Ospedale della Pietà, where the red Priest is music master, the party sit down to an evening of acrobatic keyboard improvisations and do a conga with the nuns through the chapel, before repairing to the cells with the fair musical foundlings. On a picnic at the cemetery island of San Michele, Vivaldi is seized by the notion of an opera on the story of Montezuma and we witness its first performance at the Teatro Sant'Angelo.

These elements are like some fanciful sugar sculpture adorning a banquet. Carpentier, however, is not content to leave his capriccio at that. While picnicking among the tombs, the music party stumbles across the grave of Stravinsky. "Good musician, but at times very traditional in his approach", says Vivaldi, while Handel describes his Canticum sacrum as "full of medieval-type embellishments that we stopped using long ago". Later, while paddling past Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, they encounter a funeral procession "bearing a coffin of chill-glinting bronze toward a black gondola". The casket contains, of course, "a German musician who wrote strange, colossal operas with dragons, flying horses, dwarves, Titans and even Sirens put to sing at the bottom of a river". Meanwhile, Turner's locomotive awaits it at the railway station.

The point of this deliberate anachronism is not solely to baffle the reader's expectation of a simple historical extravaganza. Carpentier's intentions become clearer at the end, where Filomeno, abandoned by his master, who has taken the train to Paris, goes to a Louis Armstrong concert in which "a glorious jamming of 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love Baby'" becomes a new baroque concerto. The implied proposition that music scorns the restraints of time, continents or traditions may be hardly original, but it lends substance to Carpentier's engaging musicological arabesque.