Behind the invective, behind the poet’s laughing response to the frozen carnival of literature, one can find other things, among them horror and a prophetic gaze that proclaims the end of the dictatorship

in Turgenev, Carpentier’s precursor, the young students aren’t orphans and the revolution is thousands of versts away

He insists that Paracelsus burn the rose and make it rise from the ashes, whether with alembics or with the Word.

on the turbulent and portable river of our inchoate lives

these are the attributes of men who are now American through and through, an impossiblity, no matter how you look at it, an act of the will, an entelechy that neither Melville nor Twain consciously constructs