The Kingdom of This World » (Translatio)

Alejo Carpentier was born in Havana in 1904. He lived for many years in France and Venezuela but returned to Cuba after the revolution. One of the major Latin American writers of this century, he is the author of The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Chase. He died in Paris in 1980.

A few years after its liberation from French colonialist rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave Ti-Noel, The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime—built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French—in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.