The Book Beat reading group selection for September is The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. We will meet virtually online via Zoom or in store on Wednesday, September 24 at 7:00 p.m.
The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation. The discussion group is free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for more information.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura.
Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.
“Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature…His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite…The mannered intensity of Carpentier’s language—maintained at fever pitch by West—propels the reader…Every sentence in the novel [is] freighted with learning and a passion for high art…What the reader takes away overall from West’s translation is a freshness and bite and aesthetic ambition that match Carpentier’s.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
“Beautiful and stirring…One of [Carpentier’s] finest works…which for many readers is the most alluring of his novels.” —Leonardo Padura, from the Introduction
“An erudite yet absorbing adventure story…A book full of riches—stylistic, sensory, visual.” —The New York Times Book Review
Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World.
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.