I oddly put down a novel by a Cubano writer and picked this one up instead, not conscientiously trading out a Cuban-flavored novel for a Cuban novel. But I did. The difference is stark. This very small novella (100 pages with a lot of chapter breaks) is a 1953 or so novel about a man on the run from a set of shadowy figures (assassins were to understand) chasing him through a city that feels like a bizarro world Havana. And I can imagine how much of a bizarro world Havana would come to feel.
Any way, this novel feels in a lot of ways like a the image of a sunrise slowly unfolding over a city landscape and as the light hits different parts of it shadows form alongside moments of illumination, creating not so much a clear picture of the city, but more so a fractured view based on the light source. As we move throughout the story, jumping into both third person narrative style and close stream of consciousness first person, we are treated less to a story, and more to a full picture slowly revealed over the course of a novel. It’s a challenging and interesting novel, but like a lot such novels, the charm is not necessarily in the reading of it.
What this got me thinking about though are the ways Gabriel Garcia Marquez is credited with bringing the world of Latin American literature to the world through One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is both true, but more so a reflection of the failures of the reading world to recognize the talents that have been there forever. This came to mind because of the ways in which this story has a lot of parallels to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but 20 years earlier.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Chase-Alejo-Carpentier/dp/0816638098/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3FJFHQRIY7CKW&keywords=alejo+carpentier+the+chase&qid=1570019729&sprefix=the+chase+alej%2Caps%2C253&sr=8-1)
