A musician in New York, doing work he hates, goes to find some primitive musical instruments in the Amazon jungle. (Bob Copeland)

Cuban writer. Tells the story of a musicologist who is searching for the animal origins of music. (Ruben Lopez Cano)

Buscar la utopía es querer encontrar el paraíso, y viceversa. Carpentier lo intentó por medio de un riquísimo lenguaje, de la naturaleza exuberante. Es un descenso a las raíces, una travesía cargada de símbolos y de una ancestral tradición cultural. Esta novela, escrita bajo el imperio del barroco, nana un viaje de vuelta: el protagonista, musicólogo, emprende una expedición al país de su infancia en busca de instrumentos musicales primitivos; al mismo tiempo, es una fuga: huye de un trabajo sin sentido, de una sociedad coimmpida.

I suppose that everyone has places on his mental map of the world that resonate for him with an almost innate affinity. (I love all things French, but Spain calls me; China is oceanic, but my heart wants India; not the Arctic but Antarctica; and rather than Africa, South America.) Alejo Carpentier caters to my romantic vision of the mystery of South America in The Lost Steps. His writing is as lush as the rivers and jungles that he describes, and the narrator-protagonist allows himself to be swept away to my great, vicarious pleasure.
The narrator is a modern man who realizes that the farther he travels in space, the farther he is moving back in time. He becomes happier and happier to give up the trappings of his life and to live simply and fully - except that he is a composer who lacks paper.
I conscientiously try not to impose my 21st century mores on earlier writers, but the women in the book arouse my great curiosity. I wish that he had done more with Ruth, the actress-wife, barred from creativity in a long-running play that parallels the couple's long-running relationship. That would, I realize, be another book. I wish that some contemporary Jean Rhys would write her story. The other two women, Mouche and Rosario, are developed even less well, being plot devices not central to the narrator and his odyssey. So while this is a wonderful book, I come away wishing for more - unfair or not. ( )

Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps. The Noonday Press, New York, 1956.

Well written and smattered with incisive and thought-provoking moments of introspection on the part of the protagonist. The story dragged a little at first but the book is full of very heady, strong images of Latin America. ( )