The Kingdom of This World

The Kingdom of This World packs literary dynamite. There can be no disputing the fact [that] Carpentier is equipped with an elegant perception and a distinctive style. A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. His rule is observed through the eyes of the elderly slave Ti Noël, who endures abuse from masters both white and black and who looks, with his charismatic fellow slave Macandal, for a release from the endless cycle of suffering through the practice of animal magic. In prose of often dreamlike coloration and intensity, Alejo Carpentier records the destruction of the black regime—built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down French rule while embodying its same hollow grandeur of false elegance attained only through slave labor—in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, madness, and erotomania.