The Lost Steps

(Paperback)

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Description

The best-known book by Cuba's most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura A Penguin Classic Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch- a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.

Reviews

An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of richesstylistic, sensory, visual. The New York Times Book Review

Extraordinary. The New Yorker

The greatest novel to have appeared in Latin America in our time. Le Figaro Littraire

Beautiful and stirring . . . One of [Carpentiers] finest works . . . which for many readers is the most alluring of his novels. Leonardo Padura, from the Introduction

Author Bio

Alejo Carpentier (19041980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.
Adrian Nathan West (translator) has translated more than thirty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, including Benjamin Labatuts When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the novel My Fathers Diet, and his essays and literary criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Baffler.He lives in Philadelphia.
Leonardo Padura (introduction) is the most internationally successful contemporary Cuban novelist, as well as a journalist and critic. His novels featuring the detective Mario Conde have been translated into many languages and have won literary prizes around the world.Padura lives in Havana.