Reasons of state
By: Alejo Carpentier ; translated by Frances Partridge ; introduction by Stanley Crouch
Contributors: Partridge, Francis, translator
Series: The Neversink Library; Neversink library
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9781612192796
Subjects: Dictators; Fiction
Work titles: Recurso del método
Description: "One of the most significant novels in Latin American literature, written by Cuba's most important modern novelist--to win a bet with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the early 1970s, friends Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Augusto Roa Bastos and Alejo Carpentier reached a joint decision: they would each write a novel about the dictatorships then wreaking misery in Latin America. Garcia Marquez went on to write The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos I, the Supreme. The third novel in this remarkable trinity is Reasons of State, hailed as the most significant novel ever to come out of Cuba. As with Garcia Marquez, Reasons of State is a bold story, boldly told -- daring in its perceptions, rich in lush detail, inventive in prose, and deadly compelling in its suspenseful plot. Inexplicably out of print for years, it tells the tale of the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country who has been living the life of luxury in high-society Paris. When news reaches him of a coup at home, he rushes back and crushes it with brutal military force. But returning to Paris he is given a chilly welcome, and learns that photographs of the atrocities have been circulating among his well-to-do friends. Meanwhile World War One has broken out, and another rebellion forces the dictator back across the ocean. As he struggles with the Marxist forces beginning to find footing in his own country, and Europe is devastated, Carpentier constructs a masterful and biting satire of the new world order"--