World Literature Reading Group

The World Literature Reading Group aims to showcase literature written outside of the anglophone world. On our journey we will make a variety of stops in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania, tracking down the masterpieces that have otherwise been overlooked. In this fifth group, we will discuss Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral.

When he arrives in Cuba at the close of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor from Marseille brings with him not only the idealism of the French Revolution but also its ambition and desire for bloodshed. Landing at the Havana doorstep of three wealthy Creole adolescent orphans, he leads them across the Caribbean Sea to Guadeloupe, into the midst of the immense changes sweeping the world outside their life in Havana. As Victor's ideals begin to warp and change to fit shifting policies, the trio can no longer bear his betrayal of revolutionary ideas. What ensues in this magical realist masterpiece speaks to the frightening and corrupting allure of power.

“What does this novel have to tell us about colonialism, globalization, feminism, human rights, the rights of nature, transculturation, migration, war? [...] The world of this novel is—much like our own, in fact—complex, protean, ambivalent, filled with characters who fluctuate between feeling fascinated and repulsed by the present, between heroism and mediocrity, between opportunistic conformity and radical idealism. [...] Explosion in a Cathedral continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world.” (Alejandro Zambra, Paris Review)

“Juxtaposing engrossing accounts of political and actual tempests raging across the Caribbean with elaborate descriptions of luxuriant decay and the idle trappings of the ancien régime, this lush, erudite period piece by Carpentier brings to visceral life the intellectual ferment and inevitable disillusionment of the Age of Reason, with pungent force. A landmark of Latin American literature.” (David Wright, Library Journal)