CARPENTIER (Y VALMONT), ALEJO

born Dec. 26, 1904, Havana died April 24, 1980, Paris novelist, musicologist, and journalist, at various times a Cuban insurgent, exile, and government official. A second-generation Cuban of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier was educated in music and architecture at the University of Havana and studied in Paris. He returned to Cuba in 1920 and aligned himself with an avant-garde group of writers. He made his living as a journalist. When he openly condemned the Machado dictatorship in 1927, he was imprisoned and later, using another writer's passport, escaped to France, where he remained until 1939. The documentary novel Ecu-Yamba-!, begun while he was in prison, was published in Madrid in 1933. It is a sympathetic account of Negro life and culture in Cuba. In 1928 he became actively engaged in the Surrealist movement, contributing frequently to Andr Breton's journal Rvolution Surraliste, but later rejected the movement. He worked in radio broadcasting (193239), and when he returned to Cuba he became director of radio station CMX in Havana, was editor of the newspaper Tiempo nuevo, and became professor of musicology at the Conservatorio Nacional (1941). In 1943 a visit to Haiti led to the novel El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World, 1957), a mixture of fantastic elements grounded in social reality, which told the story of the early 19th-century Haitian tyrant Henri Christophe. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Carpentier spent much time in Europe and North and South America, including service as cultural attach in the Cuban embassy at Paris. From 1943 he contributed to Orgenes, a major Cuban cultural journal with influence throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He published a history of Cuban music, La msica en Cuba, in 1946. A trip to the interior of Venezuela in 1941 led to his masterpiece, Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956, rev. ed., 1967), a widely acclaimed novel that tries to define the essence of Spanish-American reality as coexistence between primeval myths and a civilization imposed by the Spanish conquest. Guerra del tiempo (1958; War of Time, 1970), a collection of stories and a novella, deals with repression and violence in Cuban life in the 1950s in terms of aspects of time. Carpentier returned to Cuba from Venezuela in June 1959, toward the end of the Castro revolution, bringing with him the manuscript of the novel El siglo de las luces (1962; Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963). It interprets the contradictions of the French Revolution, its violence and its loss of ideals, from a Caribbean point of view. Its ornate style is characteristic of all Carpentier's novels. After Tientos y diferencias (1964; Acts of Feeling and Differences), a collection of essays on cultural and literary themes, Carpentier became director of a series of weekly radio broadcasts on Cuban culture and the world. From 1970 he was again cultural attach in the Cuban embassy at Paris. El recurso del mtodo (1974; Reasons of State) is about the career of the dictator Machado. Concierto barroco (1974; Baroque Concerto) is a stylistically complex novel that reaffirms Carpentier's views on the mixture of cultures in Spanish America.