The Kingdom of This World
by Alejo Carpentier
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of El reino de este undo (The Kingdom of This World) by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who was born 120 years ago on Boxing Day.
Carpentier studied architecture at the University of Havana, but became more interested in musicology. From 1942, he was the editor of Carteles, the most influential magazine in Cuba, and his left-leaning journalism supported the foundation of the Cuban Communist Party. He was briefly imprisoned in 1927 for criticizing Gerardo Machado’s government, and he subsequently escaped to Paris, where he met Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Pablo Picasso. He returned to Cuba in 1939, but moved to Venezuela for fourteen years, running a radio station and working at the Central University of Caracas. When Fidel Castro led the successful Cuban Revolution in 1959, Carpentier returned and was appointed Vice-President of the National Council of Culture. He became the director of the Cuban State Publishing House in 1962 and Cuba’s ambassador to France in 1966. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, musical scores and the first history of Cuban music. In 1977, he was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize.
The Kingdom of This World, first published in 1949, recreates the events of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, when the slave leader Toussaint Louverture staged a successful insurrection against his French colonial masters and established the world’s first independent black state. It was inspired by a trip Carpentier made to Haiti in 1943.
In his prologue, Carpentier introduces the concept of ‘lo real maravilloso’, ‘the marvellous real’: real events that are extraordinary but nonetheless true.
‘Carpentier’s writing has the power and range of a cathedral organ on the eve of the Resurrection,’ wrote the New Yorker.
The FSG edition is the only one currently in print; I have a second-hand copy of the 1975 Penguin Modern Classics edition, the cover of which shows a detail from ‘Building the Citadelle’ by the Haitian artist Jean-René Chéry.
If you’d like to know more about Toussaint Louverture, I recommend Sudhir Hazareesingh’s 2020 biography, Black Spartacus, which traces Louverture’s journey from slave to leader of Saint-Domingue’s black population, commander of its republican army and eventually its governor, before he was betrayed by Napoleon’s invading army in 1802. As the Penguin blurb says, it’s the story of ‘the world’s first black superhero’.
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I am going to take a week’s holiday over Christmas – but I look forward to being back in touch on 1 January 2025. Have a wonderful Christmas everyone!