The Kingdom of this World
Front cover of the first edition of the book's translation
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| Author | Alejo Carpentier |
|---|---|
| Original title | El reino de este mundo |
| Translator | Harriet de Onís |
| Cover artist | Joseph Low |
| Country | Cuba |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre |
Historical novel Magic Realism |
| Publisher | Edición y Distribución Iberoamericana de Publicaciones (Spanish) Alfred A. Knopf (English) |
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Publication date
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1949 |
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Published in English
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1957 |
| Media type | Hardcover and paperback |
| Pages | 198 (Spanish) 190 (English) |
| ISBN | (Spanish) (English) |
The Kingdom of This World (Spanish: El reino de este mundo) is a novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, published in 1949 in his native Spanish and first translated into English in 1957. A work of historical fiction, it tells the story of Haiti before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution as seen by its central character, Ti Noel, who serves as the novel's connecting thread. Carpentier's work has been influenced by his multi-cultural experience and his passion for the arts, as well as by authors such as Miguel de Cervantes. The novel stems from the author's desire to retrace the roots and history of the New World, and is embedded with what Carpentier calls "lo real maravilloso" or "the marvelous real" --a concept he introduced to the world of literature (not to be confused with magical realism).
Throughout the novel, varying perceptions of reality that arise due to cultural differences between its characters are emphasized and contrasted. Carpentier explores hybridization, nature, voodoo, ethnicity, history and destiny, confusion, violence, and sexuality in a style that blends history with fiction and uses repetition to emphasize the cyclical nature of events. The novel was largely well-received with much attention paid to Carpentier's inclusion of magic realism and The Kingdom of This World has been described as an important work in the development of this genre in Caribbean and Latin American literature. However, some technical aspects of his style have been ignored by the academic community, and the novel's narrative organization has been criticized.
Alejo Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba and was born on December 26, 1904 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He subsequently moved to France in 1933 (at the age of 29) and returned to Cuba six years later, in 1939. Once in Cuba, Carpentier joined a group of young writers whose goal was to establish a literature faithful to the New World, by recovering origins, history, and tradition. In 1943, he travelled to Haiti, where he was made aware of Dominique Hyppolyte's play, Le Torrent, about the Haitian Revolution, which features a character named Ti Noel. As The Kingdom of This World coincides with Carpentier's return to Cuba, it is very much influenced by the author's re-encounter with himself and his origins.
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Wikipedia