Latin America has long worn two conflicting masks. One expresses charm, gaiety, sentiment, a mood of comic opera and a long-running belle époque. The other suggests torture, massacres, tyrants, and endlessly trampled constitutions. Are the masks connected? Is the first a consolation for the second? Does the second rely on the frivolous complicity of the first?… [A tyrant in Carpentier's Reasons of State] thinks of Latin American history as an unreal suspension of time….
[The novel questions how tyrants are] able to make themselves so needed, and more important, how is a country to do without them, and to keep their future avatars from coming back? They are the malign royalty of a whole culture, clarifiers of countless fears and hopes and hatreds: hence their fascination even for those who detest them. Carpentier [shares] with other Latin American novelists, a strong sense of reality as fiction…. Reality is full of fictions in Europe and North America too, but I think we imagine the truth can be found, in most cases, if we really need it. In Latin America the truth is often not only unavailable, it is unimaginable, and unwanted…. [A] novel in Latin America, instead of being a fictional imitation of a historical world, or a self-conscious record of the movements of an individual mind, can become an attempt to understand a real world that is all too imaginary by means of imagined continuations of it: the good novels of literature combat the bad novels of life itself.
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