El reino de este mundo (1957)

The Kingdom of This World follows Ti Noël through slavery, Haiti's revolution and the coercion of Henri Christophe's new kingdom. Work demanded for magnificent buildings makes the difference between liberation and freedom painfully concrete. Carpentier's brief, marvellous narrative is a sharp starting point for revolutionary succession and the people still required to labour for it. The imaginative transformations belong to the novel's way of seeing; the brutality is anything but decorative.