The Kingdom of This World: A Novel

by Alejo Carpentier, Pablo Medina (Translator), Edwidge Danticat (Introduction)

Overview

A masterful new translation of a haunting novel of nineteenth-century Haiti

A few years after its liberation from harsh French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of great brutality under the reign of King Henri Christophe, who was born a slave but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In this unnerving novel from one of Cuba’s most celebrated authors, Henri Christophe’s oppressive rule is observed through the eyes of the elderly slave Ti Noël, who suffers abuse from masters both white and black. As he ranges across the country searching for true liberation, Ti Noël navigates bloody revolutions, maniacal rulers with false visions of grandeur, and the mysterious power of voodoo magic.

First published in English translation in 1957, The Kingdom of This World is now widely recognized as a masterpiece of Cuban and Caribbean literature. Pablo Medina’s remarkable new translation renders the dreamlike prose of Alejo Carpentier with nuance and felicity while delivering anew a powerful novel about the birth of modern Haiti. Visionary and singularly twisted, The Kingdom of This World emerges from the depths of the struggle for a country into a tale of race, erotomania, magic, and madness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537388
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Series:	FSG Classics
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	210,743
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Alejo Carpentier was born in Cuba and, after living in Europe, returned to Havana after the revolution. The author of three other novels, including The Lost Steps, he died in 1980.

Pablo Medina is a Cuban-born writer and translator. He has written sixteen books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, including Cubop City Blues, The Cigar Roller, and Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. He has translated the work of Virgilio Piñera and Federico García Lorca and has been awarded grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cintas Foundation, and others. He is a professor of fiction, poetry, and translation at Emerson College in Boston.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2017-08-30
A coruscating and influential tale of the brutal aftermath of Haiti's liberation.This powerful 1949 short novel by Carpentier (1904-1980) reportedly moved Gabriel García Márquezto rewrite parts of One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes Pablo Medina in an afterword to this new translation. There certainly are plenty of magical-realist touches that suggest the Cuban-born writer had an influence on the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, but Carpentier's magic is of a darker sort: a woman sinks her arms into boiling oil and removes them unscathed; a wounded slave is empowered to shape-shift into various animals, fathering a boar-faced child; mirrors spontaneously combust. The otherworldly imagery, though, is less a focal point than an undercurrent to an elegantly turned series of vignettes about slavery and brutality. At the story's center is Ti Noël, a slave who witnesses the rising revolt against French rule, starting with the poisoning (and rapid deaths) of plantation owners throughout the island. ("The priests had to quicken their Latin to attend to all the mourning families.") After the Haitian revolution, the country was led by King Henri Christophe, a former slave, but his rule only sustained the violence and disorder: the lavish palaces the king demanded, Ti Noël notes, "were the result of a slavery as abominable as the one he had known in the plantation." Fires, whippings, rapes, murders, and dogs trained "to eat blacks" are all part of Carpentier's milieu, and he keenly balances elegant, surrealistic prose with more realistic visions of the impact of racism and lawlessness. Ti Noël himself is no hero—he's complicit in the rapes and violence—but as a tour guide through the hellishness of black men enslaving other blacks, he delivers a memorable lesson that "it was not enough to be a goose in order to believe that all geese were equal." A stirring, surrealistic, and blood-soaked journey into a dark historical moment.

Kirkus Reviews

Carpentier's writing has the power and range of a cathedral organ on the eve of the Resurrection.” —The New Yorker

“Carpentier's energy is gigantic and pell-mell, sweeping colossi on top of each other with ruthless, contemptuous daring.” —The Yale Review

“Carpentier creates a brilliant, improbable world which has the stylized reality of the great myths.” —The Atlantic Monthly

“The Kingdom of This World packs literary dynamite. There can be no disputing the fact, Carpentier is equipped with an elegant perception and a distinctive style which make him a writer to be classed with Thomas Mann and W.H. Hudson.” —San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher