I will never know so much about Carpentier again
• Leonardo Padura launches new edition of his essay on the great novelist

BY MIREYA CASTAÑEDA—Granma International staff writer—

"AFTER 1994 I felt that I had closed my Carpentier chapter." That confession was made by the writer Leonardo Padura during the launch of a new edition of Un camino de medio siglo Alejo Carpentier y la narrativa de lo real maravilloso (Half-Century Road of Alejo Carpentier and the Narrative of Magical Realism).

The essay was first published by Letras Cubanas, when Padura won the Alejo Carpentier Prize convened by the foundation bearing the name of the great narrator, then in 2002 by the Economic Culture Fund of Mexico, and now by Ediciones Unión as part of celebrations for the centenary of the eminent novelist’s birth.

The launch in UNEAC’s Villena salon also had a singular prologue in the form of personal recollections of Alejo provided intimately but with distinction by the figures of Dr. Adelaida de Juan, journalist and novelist Marta Rojas and Araceli García-Carranza, author of an important bio-bibliography of Carpentier.

After that singular appropriation of recollections permitting a special perception of the unequalled human being who was the author of the immense Explosion in a Cathedral, Leonardo Padura also shared the road covered to reach the essay in question, "considered as the most embracing and complete on the genesis, formulation and artistic definition of the Carpentier theory and magical realism."

Padura (Havana, 1955) noted that the book took him many years of research. That interest was initially reflected in some early brief essays on specific aspects of Carpentier’s work (including "Lo real maravilloso: praxis y percepción" [Magical Realism: Praxis and Perception], subsequently converted into his first book Lo real maravilloso, creación y realidad (Magical realism, Creation and Reality, Letras Cubanas, 1989).

The essayist explained how, on finishing that book he felt: "I really hadn’t said everything I believed could and should be said on the evolution of magical realism, above all based on the readings of Carpentier’s fundamental critics."

So, in 1988, he presented a project for the Raison d’Être Prize convened by what is now the Alejo Carpentier Foundation, and won one of five scholarships that it was offering. "It was 2,100 pesos, a tremendous amount of money at that time, it also meant being able to be six months without working on the newspaper (Juventud Rebelde), at a point when I felt that my stage as a journalist was exhausted. I was looking for alternatives but couldn’t leave myself without work. The scholarship made that possible."

Of course, it is not a book of six months’ work nor is it a book compiling what Padura had written previously. "Araceli García-Carranza is an extremely important part of what this book came to be for all the help that she gave me, she is witness to the fact that many months were spent in the National Library consulting documentation on Carpentier."

In his introduction, entitled "Story of an Obsession," Padura goes into detail concerning his research, which included "a more obscure area of his work, a series of unpublished manuscripts or forgotten and relegated texts... like the case of the famous surrealist short story "El estudiante" (The Student), a complete enigma in the bibliography of Carpentier... or the complete version of the 1931 essay El momento musical latinoamericano (The Latin American Musical Moment)."

Padura recalled at the launch of the work, that he completed it in 1994, "right in the heart of the special period, and I said to myself, ‘what am I going to do with a 600-page book in my hand?’ Fortunately, the Carpentier Foundation convened the Alejo Carpentier Prize for the first and only time and I said, ‘that’s my opportunity for publishing the book.’"

That story is better known. He entered the manuscript in the competition, won the prize and that first Letras Cubanas edition came out in 1994.

"Afterwards I felt that my Carpentier chapter had closed. Everything that I could say on Carpentier was said in this book. I didn’t touch it again. I immersed myself more in my Mario Conde novels (the investigator in his highly successful detective quartet Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons). That was until the Economic Culture Fund asked me to prepare a second edition."

Naturally, he reread the book, and "it was amazing, I had the sensation that I would never be capable of rewriting that book. It was a definitive moment in that research process in which I handled all that enormous volume of bibliography on Alejo Carpentier. After that, and now, I know far less about Carpentier than I knew at the moment of writing."