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“... of party propaganda. The one they have now is the National Printing House where, under the rule of Alejo Carpentier (more later), 100,000 copies of Moby Dick were published – slightly abridged. The Cuban publishers had cleverly rewritten Melville. You had Ishmael, you had Queequeg, you had Captain Ahab, of course, you even had Father Mapple: but you ...”

“... It’s a method that owes something to the magic realism of such writers as García Márquez or Alejo Carpentier. The effect is of a heightened reality in which elements of the marvellous appear without seeming unnatural or forced; as here, in the book’s first few sentences: The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from ...”

“... people who do not believe in coincidences.’ Saramago’s epigraph is taken from the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: ‘Every future is fabulous.’ It sounds like a prescription for magical realism, and indeed Carpentier is the author of the now threadbare phrase ‘the marvellous real’, lo real maravilloso. But ...”

“... Julio Cortazar, Venezuela’s Miguel Otero Silva, Colombia’s Gabriel García Marquez, Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, the Dominican Republic’s Juan Bosch and Chile’s José Donoso and Jorge Edwards (one of them promised to take on a Bolivian dictator). When the project fell through, three of these authors went on to write fulllength novels of their ...”

“... is that the Machiguenga, in The Storyteller, emerge for the reader as such a poignant reality. Alejo Carpentier’s powerful, oppressive, bewildering novella The Chase, published in Spanish in 1956 and now translated, is elaborately hailed on the back by Carlos Fuentes as the work of the inventor of ‘magical realism’, ‘our father’. It ...”

“... novelists. In its shadowed and unreliable depths Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonardo Sciascia, Alejo Carpentier have searched out their material, reflections of ourselves; and from A State of Independence his second novel (1986), to The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips, too, has been scrying for glimpses of troubled histories. The Nature of Blood opens ...”

“... but he asserts that all his characters are Latin Americans – like the characters of Asturias, Carpentier and Garcia Marquez, searching ‘through violence for the sign of their own essence or of the order of the universe’. Latin American writers, he suggests, are different from Europeans, separated from the literary tradition which Borges claims to ...”

“... undeniably fascinating about Manichaean ranting; Mea Cuba also offers some vicious gossip about Alejo Carpentier in his last years, and a readable piece on that fine but little-known writer Calvert Casey. Cabrera does praise Reinaldo Arenas, ‘the chronicler of a country ruled not by the already impotent Fidel Castro, but by sex’. He has to, because ...”

“... the marvelous’ – is the best translated of the poems. The marvel-trackers are the followers of Alejo Carpentier, deceased, therefore Castro’s favourite Cuban writer. These camp-followers believed that the fiddler on the roof is the emblem of a new aesthetic credo and not a fauxnaif painting by Chagall, good enough to entitle a Broadway musical where ...”

“... of dictator novels, a minor genre with major members: Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974), Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State (1974), Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and now Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000). The time lag is probably significant, since the latest book is the most literal and least ...”

“... there is little doubt where meta-historical fiction began. It was born in the Caribbean with Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), which appeared in 1949, followed by his Siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) of 1962. Settings: Haiti, Cuba, French Guyana. Five years later came García Márquez’s One ...”

“... it to the bin in which we keep such worn-out epithets as ‘surrealistic’ and ‘Kafkaesque’. Alejo Carpentier’s original version is that the real itself is a marvel (the ‘real maravilloso’), and that Latin America is in its paradigmatic unevenness – in which computers co-exist with the most archaic forms of peasant culture and on up, through ...”