CLUB BRUGUERA

Después de 56 años de su primera edición, Los pasos perdidos, la extraordinaria obra de Alejo Carpentier, continúa siendo un clásico de la literatura hispanoamericana. Todavía hoy despierta el interés de los lectores porque, desde sus primeras páginas, reúne todos los elementos de una gran obra. Nos hallamos ante una gran aventura, la aventura del viaje a lo desconocido, en las profundidades de una selva como la amazónica hasta un poblado primitivo. Para alcanzarlo se necesitaron sólo unas pocas semanas. No obstante, parece que han transcurrido cientos, miles de años porque, al viajar, se ha desandado en el tiempo, hasta el punto que, al final del periplo, nos encontramos con el ser humano en su estado primigenio, cuando comenzaba sólo a nombrar las cosas. Quien realiza este viaje es un hombre amargado, enajenado, procedente de la civilización más adelantada tecnológicamente y, al mismo tiempo, más implacable y destructora espiritualmente. Nuestro protagonista tendrá que decidir si quiere permanecer en un mundo primitivo, carente de bienes materiales pero donde ha encontrado la felicidad, o retornar a la civilización donde es infeliz aunque posea «todo». Difícil dilema que puede ser el de cualquiera de nosotros. En resumen, Los pasos perdidos constituye una profunda reflexión sobre el mundo de la modernidad y la situación en la que vive el ser humano, todo ello dibujado a través de lo real maravilloso y de un lenguaje barroco que Carpentier, como nadie, llevó hasta sus últimas consecuencias; en definitiva, una obra maestra de la literatura.

"What could have been"--"You can never go home again." These are the thoughts in my mind as I came to the end of this book.
The language of this work is rich, and is put to good use describing the jungle scenes of the protagonist's journies. A music composer who works in advertising is married to a stage actress, who is always leaving to tour with her stage company. For this reason, so he justifies to himself, he has a mistress. His former teacher, a curator for a museum, offers him $ to go to the jungle to look for primitive instruments. Taking his mistress with him, he soon tires of her.....
Let's just say he gets everything he deserves. ( )

Esta obra está considerada como la más importante de este autor y un hito en la literatura del famoso "boom latinoamericano" que se produjo entre las décadas de 1950 y 1980, especialmente en el subgénero narrativo conocido como "realismo fantástico". ( )

Like all of Carpentier's books that I've read so far, this turns out to be about the contrast between the rich, "baroque" post-colonial culture of Latin America and the failed enlightenment rationalism of the Old World. The narrator is a composer, Cuban-born but living in Europe (or possibly the USA - Carpentier likes to keep things unspecified). He has an unfulfilling but well-paid job writing music for advertising films, and is married to Ruth, an actor.

He's just finished work on a film project, and Ruth has gone off on tour, when he gets an invitation from one of his university contacts to make a journey to the South-American rainforest to look for musical instruments used by indigenous people. He's reluctant, but his girlfriend Mouche proposes that they go and spend a couple of weeks together at the university's expense in a nice hotel in the South American capital city and browse the local antique shops for drums and flutes.

Needless to say, it doesn't work out like that, and they have to make the full journey after all, travelling through a succession of zones that illustrate the rich complexity of the local culture, with its intertwined threads of Conquistador, African and Indigenous influence, increasingly dominated as they get nearer to the forest by the astonishing energy of the natural environment. The narrator transfers his affections from Mouche, who turns out not to be sufficiently crease-resistant for up-river travel, to Rosario, a fully-attuned local woman who embodies everything the narrator likes about where he is and, as a bonus, even reminds him of his Cuban mother. And they find themselves in a simple rainforest community, where time seems to have been frozen since the stone age, and where the narrator would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in harmony with nature.

Whilst the Edenic valley inevitably turns out not to be the escape he thought it was going to be, the journey helps him to see the metropolitan world he's been living in more clearly, and understand how futile and tired its cultural themes are without the enriching elements the post-colonial world offers.

This is a full-on symbolic journey through all the senses, where the impressions the narrator gets from the world around him are more important than the concrete events of the plot: it's a book full of scents and tastes and images and textures as well as language, natural sounds and music. Beethoven, Bach, botany, birdsong, 17th century painters, Homer, Shelley, Goethe and Shakespeare, ... even Alberic Magnard gets a look-in. But Stravinsky and Picasso are conspicuous by their absence: Carpentier obviously doesn't hold with the modernists' way of rediscovering the Primitive. Very interesting! ( )