The Lost Steps

Rating:
Summary: The Lost Steps Only Helps You Find Your Way
Review: The novel The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier is a beautifully told story of an anthropologist/composer who seeks to understand the often confusing world we live in. Fleeing an empty existence in New York City during the mid 1930's, Victor travels down to South America in search of primitive instruments and to discover their importance to the indigenous cultures he will encounter there. Venturing deeper and deeper into the jungle, Victor feels as though he is traveling farther and farther into history and farther away from his chaotic life of New York City. The simplistic and peaceful lives of the many tribes he finds deep in the jungle, and their beautiful musical instruments and primitive beats, cause for deep thought in Victor because of the almost overwhelming difference between the world he finds himself in and the world of the United States. This great contrast sets forth an amazing story both of adventure and deep intellectual thought of this time period.
The book will take one on a journey into the depths of the human mind, the streets of New York City, and into the dense South American jungle. Never boring, the book is a page turner and will entice each and everyone who reads the book to travel, think and understand what was going on in the United States during the 30's- both the good and the bad. The book also sets up great discussion between intellectuals who know and understand the study of primitive instruments. The book is beautifully written, beautifully told and is simply great. This is a must to read to let your mind go into the deep jungle and into the concrete streets.

Rating:
Summary: a book about roots
Review: this book is about our roots,about how we find what we have left behind by leaving and forgetting about our precious past.this story is peppered with the sound of music through it all, music which carries pace with the story and is mingled and transformed into a symphony in the narrators head. i really enjoyed reading this little cute book even when sometimes the pace of the story is slow due to the detail descriptions but the novel is really worth the effort. LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: The Lost Steps
Review: This book is perhaps the most horribly pretentious work of literature I've ever read. Some people write books out of passion or a desire to express emotion. Carpentier, however, wrote this book simply for the purpose of writing literature. It is ironic that Carpentier spends much of his book ridiculing the pseudo-inetellectual community for their pretentions to greatness, while in fact he is the worst of them all. References to works of literature and music seem out of place and cited only to prove the author's familiarity with them. If you want a better treatment of the same theme, read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness instead. The Lost Steps is not worth touching with a ten foot pole.

Rating:
Summary: The Lost Steps
Review: This book is perhaps the most horribly pretentious work of literature I've ever read. Some people write books out of passion or a desire to express emotion. Carpentier, however, wrote this book simply for the purpose of writing literature. It is ironic that Carpentier spends much of his book ridiculing the pseudo-inetellectual community for their pretentions to greatness, while in fact he is the worst of them all. References to works of literature and music seem out of place and cited only to prove the author's familiarity with them. If you want a better treatment of the same theme, read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness instead. The Lost Steps is not worth touching with a ten foot pole.

Rating:
Summary: Latin American Classic
Review: This great adventure novel was first published in 1953 and many of the scenes in this book seem prototypes for others I've come across in Latin American fiction. It is a story of a modern, educated, well traveled man, fleeing from the horrors of Europe leading up to WWII, to the Americas, who is then transposed into a world where the people still live in the stone age, a hidden city in the jungle and a bubble in time.

Our hero & narrator dreamed when young of becoming a great musician, but has long since sold himself out just for the sake of earning a living. He rarely sees his wife, an actress, because they both have busy schedules that seldom coincide. One day a fated encounter with a museum curator he knew in his youth leads him to a mission into the jungle to find and bring back the most primitive of musical instruments and to gain anthropological insights on the origins of music. The musician, who begins the trip with his mistress, ends up on his own cut off from civilization. In the jungle he at last able to find an inner peace and happiness, he finds a new woman, regains his health & vigor and at last is able to release the musical score he has always known was inside him. By the time his wife has a plane sent in as a publicity stunt to rescue him, he does not want to return.

This novel is deeply philosophical, in the end our musician can no longer find a place in either world, and the message is we can't go back, also theories about early humans which have been arrived at only by studying archaeological artifacts can only be flawed, to quote "New worlds had to be lived before they could be analyzed".

Rating:
Summary: Latin American Classic
Review: This great adventure novel was first published in 1953 and many of the scenes in this book seem prototypes for others I've come across in Latin American fiction. It is a story of a modern, educated, well traveled man, fleeing from the horrors of Europe leading up to WWII, to the Americas, who is then transposed into a world where the people still live in the stone age, a hidden city in the jungle and a bubble in time.

Our hero & narrator dreamed when young of becoming a great musician, but has long since sold himself out just for the sake of earning a living. He rarely sees his wife, an actress, because they both have busy schedules that seldom coincide. One day a fated encounter with a museum curator he knew in his youth leads him to a mission into the jungle to find and bring back the most primitive of musical instruments and to gain anthropological insights on the origins of music. The musician, who begins the trip with his mistress, ends up on his own cut off from civilization. In the jungle he at last able to find an inner peace and happiness, he finds a new woman, regains his health & vigor and at last is able to release the musical score he has always known was inside him. By the time his wife has a plane sent in as a publicity stunt to rescue him, he does not want to return.

This novel is deeply philosophical, in the end our musician can no longer find a place in either world, and the message is we can't go back, also theories about early humans which have been arrived at only by studying archaeological artifacts can only be flawed, to quote "New worlds had to be lived before they could be analyzed".

Rating:
Summary: The Lost Steps
Review: This is the best literature I have read in my life! Alejo makes the story come to life, putting you in the middle of it. I would recomend this book to anybody who enjoys good books