Cuban Baroque : THE CHASE <i> by Alejo Carpentier; translated by Alfred Mac Adam (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $15.95; 105 pp.) </i>

Scholars of Latin American literature have identified Alejo Carpentier’s “The Chase” as the missing link between Borges and the current boom in Latin American fiction. There is no doubt that Carpentier’s work merits this high praise. Carlos Fuentes has pointed out that “Alejo Carpentier transformed the Latin American novel. He transcended naturalism and invented magical realism. He took the language of the Spanish baroque and made it imagine a world where literature does not imitate reality, but, rather, adds to reality. It is good to know that “The Chase” is in English at last. We welcome back our father and his bounty: We owe him the heritage of a language and an imagination. We are all his descendants.”

The late, Alejo Carpentier, one of Cuba’s best-known novelists is the author of many engaging books, including “The Lost Steps,” “The Kingdom of This World” and “Explosion in a Cathedral.” Originally “The Chase” entitled “El Acoso” was included in a collection of short stories entitled “Guerra del Tiempo” (War of Time) written by Carpentier while in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1955. “The Chase” stands alone as a diamond among a collection of literary gems.

In his novels and short stories, Carpentier probes the affects of time upon humankind. He studies the metaphysics of time in the Caribbean experience and in particular Cuba. “The Chase” deals with a specific moment during the period of the false Cuban Republics, supported by the United States the dictatorship of Gen. Gerardo Machado y Morales, who became president in 1925 and eventually was overthrown by a revolutionary movement led by Fulgencio Batista in 1933. During the Machado y Morales dictatorship direct confrontation was the response to the government’s violent repression of the Cuban populace. This is the social context that Carpentier captures to explore the constant looniness and isolation and the relentless pursuit of freedom and happiness of modern humankind. People are either the pursued or the pursuers. This is the lesson in Carpentier’s complex tale of political intrigue.

The story centers on a young man, anonymous throughout the text, who leaves his hometown, “Sancti Spiritus,” located in the central Cuban province of Santa Clara, to study in Habana. The young man favors a communist solution to the political situation of the time and joins with violent- action groups against the dictatorship. He learns urban guerrilla war tactics, the methods of a man of action: how to handle fire arms, construct bombs and deliver booby traps by mail and more. He dedicates himself unconditionally to the cause, and yet because he is an idealist, he allows himself to be exploited and betrayed by the people he wants to help. He is asked to deliver a package that is really a bomb placed in a book. When the book is opened, it explodes and kills two people.

The young student is arrested, and to avoid castration by government forces, he informs “canta” on his fellow revolutionaries. “The idea of an assault on his sex was intolerable to him, beyond all right, beyond all power. He had killed, but he hadn’t castrated. And now they were going to mutilate him . . . . The first bite of the pincers drew such a long and desolate animal howl out of him that the others, calling him a coward, silenced him with a punch. . . . He told them whatever they wanted to hear. . . .” Because of his denunciation, members of the political action groups are murdered where they are hiding.

The young man is released but condemned to death by the underground groups. He hides and is finally found by his pursuers in a cafe. The young man runs away and enters a concert hall where the “Eroica,” Beethoven’s third symphony, is being performed. As the “acosado,” the hunted student sits and listens to Beethoven’s third in this temporary sanctuary. He relives his life up to the present moment. He is alone amongst the audience and convinces himself that he has escaped his pursuers. “They won’t think I stayed here. No body stays in a theater after the show is over. Nobody stays sitting in front of an empty, dark stage where nothing is being shown. They will close up the five exits with bolts and padlocks, and I’ll stretch out on the red rug of that box over there--where the two in back have already gotten up--curled up like a dog. I’ll sleep until dawn, until after it clears up at ten, until after midday. Sleep: The first thing is sleep. After that, a new era will begin.)”

This tragic and common story Carpentier plots into three parts, segmented into 18 long paragraphs. In the first part, Carpentier begins his novel by introducing the reader to the pursued man’s “other.” The ticket-seller at the theater, whose thoughts and actions are narrated in the third person and who “in a cage like a monkey,” observes the people of leisure who can afford the luxury of a symphony. “If he was there, perched on the stool, leaning against the worn damask curtain, in that ticket both as narrow as a desk drawer, it was so he could learn to understand great things, because he admired things others kept behind closed doors, locked away from his poverty.” The ticket seller is a student of music, a musician, and admirer of Beethoven, yet he, like the young revolutionary, is caught in a world of oppression and great solitude, which he endeavors to escape everyday of his life by working at the concert hall.

Suddenly the pursued young man appears hurried and buys a ticket to the concert. He enters, listens, waits and remembers. The reader is privileged to his memories, to his anguished first-person singular interior monologue. This monologue constitutes the second part of the book and is made up of recollections of his past and events occurring in the last six days. Through these recollections and commentaries, Carpentier reveals the young man’s ideals, hopes and emotions as well as the socio-political oppression and turmoil of a totalitarian state.

Both the young student and the ticket seller trace their lives and paths through the tumultous city of Havana and both have a relationship with a prostitute named Estrella. She is willing to help them, but she, like her male pursuers, is doomed to a life of fear and solitude.

In the third part, the monologue of the “acosado” ends with the last notes of the “Eroica,” and after the concert hall is empty, gun shots are mistaken by some musicians for thunder. The symphony’s duration, approximately one hour, offers the structural time frame for the text. Upon finishing the novel, the reader has experienced a desperate hour in the life of the “acosado” and one tedious hour in the life of the ticket seller.

Through Alfred Mac Adam’s worthy translation, Carpentier communicates a multiplicity of meaning in an elaborated but concise language. He masterfully interrelates the themes of the double-cross, persecution, fear, prostitution, religion, music, art, architecture, creation and terrorism to the events and the characters in his labryinthe text. Carpentier’s is a must-read novel that offers a rich cultural reading and profound insights to the Latin American experience. “The Chase” is Carpentier at his best and one of Latin America’s finest artistic articulations.