Alejo Carpentier, a major Latin-American novelist with a dense, allusive style that has influenced other writers, was born in Havana on 26 December 1904, St. Stephen's Day. His father, Georges, an architect, was French, and his mother was of Russian descent. The Carpentiers had arrived in Cuba two years before Alejo was born, their sights on a better lot in the newest of the Spanish-American republics. Cuba had been declared independent by the United States on 20 May 1902, after a nearly four-year occupation that followed Spain's defeat in the war of 1898. The Carpentiers were not poor immigrants, however. The house in which they settled in El Cotorro, on the outskirts of Havana, must have been of considerable size, because Carpentier would later recall roaming in his father's library, and in such novels as El acoso (1956; translated as Manhunt, 1959) and Los pasos perdidos (1953; translated as The Lost Steps, 1956) there are mentions of...