FL 380: An Archaeology of the "Boom":
Modern Latin American Prose Fiction
Reading Guide to Carpentier #1
The Lost Steps
- Note: Why is the author -not the same thing as the narrator- giving
us all this information about the landscape depicted in The Lost Steps?
- vi Are we to believe that the narrator's story is a part of Alejo Carpentier's
biography? Is The Lost Steps to be read as an autobiography?
- 3 Who is narrating?
a. Time turning back
- 4 Repetition
- 5 Art/(Ruth's drama) as a "parasite"
- 5 automatism
- 6 His "husband's duty"... What twinges of conscience?
- 7 The "other one"? Is he driven to her?
- 8 Ruth: not a wife but a "leading lady"?
- 9 repetition
a. Sisyphus?
b. Impossible to revive "certain epics of heroes or saints"
- 10 "a vicious caprice aroused by drink took me to secret apartments
where personal identity was left at the door"???
a. What is this all about?
- 10 chained to clocks, chronographs, and metronomes
- 11 Language and memory
- 12 Brentano's: Identify this place.
- 13 The rain: the beginning of it all?