Mapped
The Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier
Carpentier's northern Haiti runs from the sugar plantations of the Plaine du Nord and the colonial port of Cap-Français, through the night of the slave uprising, to the mountaintop kingdom that the freed slave Henri Christophe built for himself. The map holds the plain, the city now called Cap-Haïtien, the palace of Sans-Souci at Milot and the fortress of the Citadelle above it, with a single excursion across the water to the Cuban exile of Santiago.
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The Lost Steps
Alejo Carpentier
A disillusioned musicologist, fleeing his hollow modern life, travels to South America and up a great river into the jungle in search of primitive instruments, and finds a world outside time before losing the way back to it. Carpentier maps the real journey up the Orinoco: the Latin American capital of Caracas, the river port of Puerto Ayacucho, the great river climbing into the Guiana highlands, and the deep forest of the tepuis where a settlement seems to exist before history itself.
5 places →