I was a good chunk of the way in -- but still far from finishing -- José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night when a scheduled vacation in Guadeloupe was drawing close. I had started it optimistically thinking I could finish it before leaving, but I was only about a third of the way through. This was decidedly not what I wanted to be reading on vacation in the Caribbean. Luckily, I came to a break between parts and so I set it aside to be resumed when I returned from vacation. Of course, I was then faced with the dilemma of what to read on my trip. I picked Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World in part because it was about the Caribbean (pre and post revolutionary Haiti, to be precise) and in part because Carpentier is who got me interested in Guadeloupe (via his Explosion in a Cathedral) and in part because the edition I had was well worn and the book is slim and it seemed manageable for my short trip. As it happened, I didn't pick up the book once while in Guadeloupe, but between a bit of reading the day before my departure and on my flights to and from Pointe-a-Pitre, I finished it, so I think I made a good choice. (We'll ignore the fact that I brought a second book with me in case I finished the Carpentier while I was away - hahahahaaaa...)
I was kind of disappointed in this book. I think mostly because of its brevity, which is, of course, why I picked it up when I did, so it seems kind of dumb to complain about it, but here we are. I was very excited to read Carpentier's treatment of the Haitian Revolution, and it just seemed light. While reading it, I felt like I knew either too much or too little about the Haitian Revolution going in. If I had known less about it, I might not have been so occupied with what was going on when; as it was, I kept wanting to refer back to The Black Jacobins, which I now intend to reread. My disappointment aside, the prose and the imagery in The Kingdom of This World were lovely. The book is told largely from the perspective of the slave Ti Noel and covers a long span of his life, with big gaps. This may sound a little odd without context, but I found the end of the book, when Ti Noel gives up on humanity and takes on non-human forms, only to discover the challenges of them, to be especially beautiful.
