[Some] readers may have … decided that indeed the reasons for Carpentier's failure to capture an audience here are those same reasons put forth by the earliest reviewers: that his fiction is too "erudite," that he is more a "cultural historian" than a novelist,… or that he is a "tiresome philosophizer."…
One may quarrel with some of these negative views, but on the question of the absence of a substantial audience for the novelist's work, one flails about like a ghostfighter, firing at shadows, starting at the slightest sound in the woods. What makes the U.S. reading audience so obligingly ignorant of Cuba's greatest novelist? Perhaps the answer does lie in the books themselves. Certainly The Lost Steps for all its superficial affinities with the variety of romantic fiction which North Americans love to indulge in … presents an odd and strangely formidable face to the U.S. reader. Despite its emphasis on the estrangement of the main character from the life of the modern city and the lushness of its sequences devoted to jungle landscape and its exotic inhabitants, it remains an inherently ironic novel whose bite and tension seem lost in its English translation. (p. 16)
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