Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (#1949Club)

"...this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering..."

Ti Noël is a slave on a plantation in Haiti twenty years before the Haitian Revolution. Due to his expertise in horses, he goes with his master to the town to select a new breeding stallion for the farm. There he sees wax heads in a barber shop representing the king and other nobility in a barber shop; next door he sees similarly garlanded wax heads of pigs at the butcher's shop. They look the same to him.

In the next chapter Ti Noël is leading the horse at the mill and his fellow slave Macandal is feeding in the sugar cane when Macandal's arm is caught between the millstones. Ti Noël stops the horse at once and cuts the traces, allowing him turn the stones back, but it's too late: there's nothing to be done but amputate.

But the symbolic violence of the first chapter and the accidental violence of the second are only precursors to real deliberate violence. Macandal leads an early and unsuccessful revolt; he is burned at the stake in 1758. Ti Noél later meets Bouckman, who brings news of the French Revolution, and who helps start what will be the successful Haitian revolution, though Bouckman himself is killed by French troops in 1791.

Alejo Carpentier was born in 1904 in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, but the family moved to Cuba shortly after his birth where he was mostly raised. In 1927 he escaped Cuba after protesting the dicatorial government of the time, and settled in France. In 1939 he returned to Cuba. In 1943 he made a trip to Haiti where he saw the sites described in his novel. Again after the war he felt it safer to leave Cuba and settled in Venezuela until the Cuban Revolution when he returned once again. In 1966 Castro appointed him ambassador to France. In 1977 he won the Cervantes prize; he died in 1980.

During Carpentier's trip to Haiti, he saw what he named 'lo real maravilloso', the 'marvelous real' in the world, and encorporated it in this, his second novel. It's often considered a precursor to magical realism, and it does seem clear to me that Garcia Marquez was in fact reading Carpentier. One aspect of the marvelous real for Carpentier is voudou: we as readers don't doubt (mostly) that Macandal was burned at the stake, but we're teased, at least for a bit, with the thought that he transformed himself into something that could fly away, and this was widely believed at the time.

The Haitian Revolution was successful, resulting in the second independent country in the New World, but still maybe it was not a success. 

Ti Noël's owner flees the revolution for Cuba, but once there falls apart financially and psychologically and loses Ti Noël while gambling. Ti Noël eventually wins his freedom and decides to return to Haiti, where he is immediately re-enslaved by Henri Christophe, the black king of half of Haiti. Now an old man, Ti Noël is forced to carry bricks to a mountain top to build the Citadel Laferrière: 

 

The kingdom of Henri Christophe does not last and finally Ti Noël is free, but he does not live long himself to enjoy that freedom.

Macandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe (I used the spellings given by Carpentier--spelling as you can imagine for the time, was not well-defined) are all historical figures. I had not realized that Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon's younger sister) was in Haiti during their Revolution, but at the time (1802) she was the wife of Leclerc, the French general who was tasked by Napoleon with re-enslaving the Haitians. She and her husband both appear. 

The Kingdom of this World is novella lengath, and lyrically written, though still easy to read--I read it in a day in a translation by Harriet de Onís. There is apparently another later translation. The edition I read includes a useful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian novelist and memoirist. I've read one other novel by Carpentier, The Chase, which I enjoyed, but this I thought a masterpiece. 

"In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasumch as there is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

It's the week of the 1949 Club! Hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. I have hopes of reading a second before the end of the week. If I'm very ambitious, I might reread one of (both great!) Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm or Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails.

 

No Other Life (#BrianMooreAt100)

 "'There is no other life,' my mother said."

Fr. Paul Michel is a priest, an Albanesian, who has spent his career teaching at an elite school in Ganae, an island in the Caribbean. He's about to retire and return to his country of birth, Canada, where he no longer has any particular connection. The novel is a reminiscence about the one important event, the one important person, in his life. 

Early in his teaching career the school established, reluctantly, a few scholarships for the impoverished, who are generally blacker than the elite, and one of the students they took in, on Fr. Michel's recommendation, was the orphaned Jean-Paul Cantave. Cantave becomes Fr. Michel's boy, his Petit. Cantave is a brilliant student, who goes on to become a priest and join the Albanesian order, studying in Europe, and finally returning to Ganae to help his native land. 

And become its president. 

It's still the era of liberation theology, though just barely. John Paul II is pope, and the future Benedict XVI is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and they have little brief for left-wing priests in politics. 

There are no Albanesians, there is no Ganae, and--it is a novel--there is no Jean-Paul Cantave. But the Albanesians are more or the less the Salesians, Ganae is more or less Haiti, and Cantave is more or less, though probably less, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

Well. Aristide's own story is not yet ended. No Other Life came out in 1993, so Moore couldn't know its complexities, but he clearly has some understanding what they might be like. Aristide had been elected president of Haiti in March of 1991 and turfed in a coup later that year. Cantave faces a coup as well. Is Cantave a good man? What does it mean for a priest to be a good man in a dire political world? Dedicated to this world or the next? Fr. Michel's mother had encouraged him to become a priest, but on her deathbed has a crisis of faith, and declares to her priest/son there is no other life. But does Fr. Michel believe that? His own faith doesn't seem to be rock-solid. The ending gives a hint of the conclusion Fr. Michel came to, but remains ambiguous.

I thought this was very good. Like The Colour of Blood that I read earlier this year, it's a novel of a man of faith facing a difficult political situation and wondering what to do.

It just so happened that I was reading about the Plain Style in an entirely different book (Timothy Steele's introduction to The Poems of J. V. Cunningham). Moore is the absolute master of a spare, pared-down style. Steele quotes Cicero (from Orator):

"He follows the ordinary usage, really differing more than is supposed from those who are not eloquent at all. Consequently the audience, even if they are no speakers themselves, are sure they can speak in that fashion. For that plainness of style (orationis subtilitas) seems easy to imitate at first thought, but when attempted nothing is more difficult."

This could equally have applied to Moore. But it makes him difficult to quote, because it all looks so danged ordinary.

I admit to having found Moore uneven in the past, and until this year I thought his best books were about terribly sad lives of poverty and limited scope (Judith Hearne, Ginger Coffey) and so difficult to read for their subject. But The Colour of Blood and No Other Life make it clear he's got another very sharp arrow in his quiver.

It would be Brian Moore's 100th birthday this year. Cathy at 746books is hosting a readalong.