Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier wrote The Kingdom of This World and, in its preface, coined lo real maravilloso, the idea that became magical realism. He grew up in Havana with a French father and a Russian mother, trained partly as an architect, worked as a journalist, and was imprisoned in 1927 for signing a manifesto against the Machado dictatorship, escaping to Paris on a French poet's passport. He spent eleven years there among the surrealists and concluded that their marvellous was manufactured, whereas in the Caribbean it was the ordinary condition of the history. The proof he offered was Haiti, which he visited in 1943. The Kingdom of This World, published in 1949, covers the Haitian revolution and its aftermath through the eyes of a slave named Ti Noel: the poisoner Mackandal, who is said to have escaped the pyre by turning into an insect; Bouckman and the ceremony at Bois Caiman; and Henri Christophe, the former slave who made himself a king and built the citadel at La Ferriere with forced labour and shot himself with a silver bullet. Carpentier's argument was that none of this needed inventing. He also wrote The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral, was a serious musicologist, and served the Cuban revolutionary government as cultural attache in Paris until his death. His preface to the novel is the founding statement of lo real maravilloso and is usually printed with it. He was careful to distinguish it from surrealism, which he thought a trick, and later Latin American writers took the idea somewhere he did not entirely approve of. Garcia Marquez acknowledged the debt anyway. He was born in Switzerland, a fact he concealed all his life while claiming Havana.

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