The Lost Steps

<b>The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura<br><br>A Penguin Classic</b><br><br>Dissatisfied with his empty Sisyphus-like existence in New York City where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history searching not just for music but ultimately for himself and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.<br><br>For more than seventy-five years Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2000 titles Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. “An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of riches—stylistic sensory visual.” —<i><b>The New York Times Book Review</b></i><br><br>“Extraordinary.” —<i><b>The New Yorker</b></i><br><br>“The greatest novel to have appeared in Latin America in our time.” —<b><i>Le Figaro Littéraire</i></b><br><br>“Beautiful and stirring . . . One of [Carpentier’s] finest works . . . which for many readers is the most alluring of his novels.” ―<b>Leonardo Padura from the Introduction</b> <b>Alejo Carpentier</b> (1904–1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are <i>The Lost Steps</i><i> Explosion in a Cathedral</i> and <i>The Kingdom of This World</i>. Born in Lausanne Switzerland and raised in Havana Cuba Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France where he lived until his death.<br><b>Adrian Nathan West</b> (translator) has translated more than thirty books from Spanish Catalan and German including Benjamin Labatut’s <i>When We Cease to Understand the World</i> a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. He is the author of <i>The Aesthetics of Degradation </i>and the novel <i>My Father’s Diet</i> and his essays and literary criticism have appeared in <i>The New York Review of Books London Review of Books The Times Literary Supplement</i> and <i>The Baffler</i>. He lives in Philadelphia.<br><b>Leonardo Padura</b> (introduction) is the most internationally successful contemporary Cuban novelist as well as a journalist and critic. His novels featuring the detective Mario Conde have been translated into many languages and have won literary prizes around the world. Padura lives in Havana. <b>“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer <i>The New York Review of Books</i><br><br>The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura<br><br>A Penguin Classic</b><br><br>Dissatisfied with his empty Sisyphus-like existence in New York City where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history searching not just for music but ultimately for himself and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.<br><br>For more than seventy-five years Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2000 titles Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.