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A review by kingeditor
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
5.0
If The Kingdom of This World were even a little bit longer, it would be unbearable. The misery of the plot and the sumptuousness of the prose would drive any reader either to despair or exhaustion. As it is, The Kingdom of This World is brimming but not overstuffed with some of the most baroque language, passionate struggles, and inhuman cruelty to ever fill a novel of such short length.
The title’s meaning is stated outright at the very end, but I feel that a reader could discern it from the opening pages, in which the decadence of the colonial ruling class is put on extravagant display. Decadence—material, cultural, and sexual—is what separates Earth from Heaven and is Alejo Carpentier’s obsession, along with musicology. Both are intertwined through the cycle of revolutions, as the classical European music of the oppressors gives way to the primal drum rhythms of the Haitian people who continuously overthrow them.
This motif of eternal recurrence, by which a new class (and skin color) of enslavers replaces the old, lends the novel a tone of overwhelming pessimism all the way until its last gasp. I won’t spoil it, but the main character, Ti Noel, has an epiphany about the prospects for mankind in the torturous injustice that is life on Earth. That this provides some semblance of catharsis for the reader yet not a corrective to the events they have just witnessed is not a discredit to Carpentier’s skill as a writer, only a testament to the colossal tragedy of Caribbean history.
The title’s meaning is stated outright at the very end, but I feel that a reader could discern it from the opening pages, in which the decadence of the colonial ruling class is put on extravagant display. Decadence—material, cultural, and sexual—is what separates Earth from Heaven and is Alejo Carpentier’s obsession, along with musicology. Both are intertwined through the cycle of revolutions, as the classical European music of the oppressors gives way to the primal drum rhythms of the Haitian people who continuously overthrow them.
This motif of eternal recurrence, by which a new class (and skin color) of enslavers replaces the old, lends the novel a tone of overwhelming pessimism all the way until its last gasp. I won’t spoil it, but the main character, Ti Noel, has an epiphany about the prospects for mankind in the torturous injustice that is life on Earth. That this provides some semblance of catharsis for the reader yet not a corrective to the events they have just witnessed is not a discredit to Carpentier’s skill as a writer, only a testament to the colossal tragedy of Caribbean history.