Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, essayist and musicologist, born in 1904 and died in 1980, who profoundly shaped Latin American literature in the years before its celebrated literary "boom." Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to French and Russian parents, he was raised in Havana and kept a strong Cuban identity throughout his life and career. He is remembered as a pioneering practitioner of what he called "lo real maravilloso," the marvelous real, a technique for treating the extraordinary dimensions of Latin American history and culture as continuous with the everyday; his best-known novel, The Kingdom of This World (1949), drew on Afro-Cuban traditions and the Haitian Revolution to develop the idea, and his work is widely credited as a forerunner of the magical realism that later Latin American writers made famous.
Facts
Award1977 Cervantes Prize; also awarded the French Prix Médicis etranger in 1979 for La harpe et l'ombre 1 Classification
Original Language Original Language Original Language Alejo Carpentier
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FAQs
Is Alejo Carpentier's lo real maravilloso the same as magical realism?
It is narrower: Carpentier wrote about real history so extreme that it seems magical.
Not exactly. Carpentier's theory of lo real maravilloso holds that the history and geography of Latin America are so extreme that they appear fictional or even magical to outsiders. He set out the idea in the prologue to The Kingdom of This World (1949), a novel of the Haitian Revolution that follows the history of Henri Christophe, first king of Haiti. Some critics treat the term as a synonym for magical realism, but its scope is narrower. Where Gabriel García Márquez includes events that a reader never mistakes for reality, Carpentier mostly writes about aspects of Latin American history and geography that are almost unbelievable but true.
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Also in Language Atlas: the original language of this subject.
Also in Language Atlas: the original language of this subject.
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Source Alejo Carpentier (Wikipedia)tier 2
Also in Geography Atlas: the nationality of this subject.
Source Alejo Carpentier (Wikipedia)tier 2
Sources
1. Alejo Carpentier (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLife section, Early life and education, opening sentence
Carpentier was born on December 26, 1904, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to Jorge Julián Carpentier, a French architect, and Lina Valmont, a Russian language teacher.
Life section, closing sentence on his final illness and death
Carpentier was struggling with cancer as he completed his final novel, El arpa y la sombra, and finally died in Paris on April 24, 1980.
Section on honors, sentence naming the Cervantes Prize and Prix Medicis
He received the Cervantes Prize in 1977 and was recipient of the French Laureates Prix Médicis étranger in 1979 for La harpe et l'ombre.
Original language statement
Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, essayist and musicologist, born in 1904 and died in 1980, who profoundly shaped Latin American literature in the years before its celebrated literary "boom." Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to French and Russian parents, he was raised in Havana and kept a strong Cuban identity throughout his life and career.
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