From the point of view of strictly revolutionary literary ethics ["Explosion in a Cathedral"] was a curiously evasive achievement, dramatizing as it did the contradictory allegiances between private sensibility and public ideology. The two principal characters found themselves driven either toward a lucid, contemplative humanism or a draconian revolutionary spirit formed under the inevitable shadow and example of Saint-Just. Though it was set in the Antilles of the 18th century, most readers took the setting for what it is—pure Zanuck cum Goldwyn. "Explosion in a Cathedral" was the book of a writer who found himself to be an ambiguous if not anguished witness to the first years of a revolution in the here and now….
["Reasons of State"] is variously set in the Paris of the teens and the twenties, and at the same time in a mythical country of a distinctly Central American stripe called Nueva Córdoba…. The declining tyrant (who remains nameless throughout) seems to be modeled on a few of those horrific dictators of the past—the "educated tyrant," as Carpentier calls them….
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