A review by leelulah
Los pasos perdidos by Alejo Carpentier

1.0

I didn't like this book at all. Some structures were okay in relation to the prose, but it's a nauseous piece of work, hailed for being more than it is. It has an incredible amount of intertextuality, which apparently, makes you smart among postmodernists.

Spoiler

Imagine a guy who thinks he's a great composer but instead he's perpetually doing nothing and failing to provide for his wife, 'cause at the core, he's a libertine. But, since she's an actress and he can never see her -and if they do, they only have sex-, I guess cheating on her is okay, that's his logic. Similarly, when he leaves Europe for Venezuela in search of the origin of music, which he never really finds, he goes away with her wild-yet-too-European french lover, which he'll abandon by a local woman, whom he cannot see outside "feminine activities such as washing clothes" (because apparently his mother didn't teach him how to do it), and looks down upon for considering her "primitive". When his Fench lover finds out this double cheating, turns out that she "shouldn't get upset".

At this, his wife initiates an international search, but he only goes back to Europe to tell her with an appalling calmness, that he's getting divorced. "Yeah, I've been away from months and I have given no sign of life, but yeah, we're getting divorced".

Following his logic, he's absolutely blameless. And for all his uncaring attitude towards pornography, he sure spends a lot of time analyzing women's bodies.

Also there is this really disturbing scene where a man with leprosy rips a 9 year old girl's genitals and then we have him killed, because "yeah, justice".

Fantastic.