Literary places in Orinoco

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.

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