The Lost Steps

By: Alejo Carpentier, Adrian Nathan West - translator, Leonardo Padura - introduction

Narrated by: Caleb Summers

“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

The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura

A Penguin Classic

Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.

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

“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

“An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of riches—stylistic, sensory, visual.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature. . . . His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite. . . . The mannered intensity of Carpentier’s language—maintained at fever pitch by West—propels the reader. . . . Every sentence in the novel [is] freighted with learning and a passion for high art. . . . 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

A journey to parts unknown

If you’ve ever wondered about leaving modern civilization behind, then this is the book for you. Romanticism turns to reality and in the end, the question remains of whether cosmopolitan human beings are capable of living in a remote society that has not changed in millennia. Yet the literary quality and the expert narration make it worth the journey.

Fantastic!

What a beautifully written novel. it was worth every moment. The narrator was outstanding and truly made the story come alive.