Explosion in a Cathedral

By: Alejo Carpentier, Adrian Nathan West - translator, Alejandro Zambra - foreword

Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.”—Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

One of Cuba’s—and Latin America’s—greatest historical novels, about imperial conquest carried out under the guise of liberation, in its first new English translation in sixty years and featuring a new foreword by Alejandro Zambra

A Penguin Classic

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 bloodlust. Landing at the Havana doorstep of a trio of wealthy, eccentric Creole orphans, he sweeps them across the Caribbean Sea to Guadeloupe, whose enslaved Africans he frees only then to exploit them in his fight against the British for colonial sovereignty. What ensues in Alejo Carpentier’s swashbuckling, magical realist masterpiece is an explosive clash between the New World and the Old World, and between revolutionary ideals and the corrupting allure of power.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

©2023 Alejo Carpentier (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A tour de force . . . built around the exciting and timely theme of revolutionary-turned-tyrant.”―The New York Times Book Review

“Penguin Classics has recently published sensational new translations of two of Carpentier’s novels, The Lost Steps (1953) and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). . . . What made them influential, and makes them so dazzlingly readable still, is their style. . . . Needless to say, this marriage of style and subject would be illegible to English-language readers without a first-rate translator, and in Adrian Nathan West, Penguin Classics has found their man.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature. . . . His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite. . . . [With] a sure feel for voice and cadence . . . West lovingly restores the eccentric sweep and florid detail of the novel, better conveying the grandness of Carpentier’s vision . . . West’s translation is sensitive to his humor and irony, and the reader is borne happily along through the thickets. . . . What the reader takes away overall from West’s translation is a freshness and bite and aesthetic ambition that match Carpentier’s.”—Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books