Editing Alejo Carpentier (section)

=== ''El Acoso'' (''The Chase'') ===
{{original research section|date=November 2021}}
Carpentier's ''El Acoso'' was originally published in Spanish in 1956. It was translated into American English by Alfred MacAdam as ''The Chase'' and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989,<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=The Chase|last=Carpentier|first=Alejo|publisher=New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux|year=1989|publication-date=1989|translator-last=Mac Adam|translator-first=Alfred}}</ref> after over three decades of suppression in the United States for Carpentier's affiliation with Fidel Castro's Cuba<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Chase|last1=Fuentes|first1=Carlos|last2=Carpentier|publisher=Farrar, Straus, Giroux|year=1989|pages=back cover}}</ref> (Carpentier had been Cuba's ambassador to France during this time).  The novel is one of the most influential novels in contemporary Latin American literature, cited by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso and others as a major influence in the movement known in North America as Latin American Magical Realism, though this identification is somewhat misleading (see section above on Carpentier's theory of ''Lo real maravilloso'') as Carpentier, in his ''lo real maravilloso'', makes a point of referring to actual events that are so fantastic they seem magical, while the Magic Realists used Surrealist techniques and invent completely imaginary events with only the most tenuous connection to history or real events.  As for ''El Acoso'', the novel is highly compressed, richly atmospheric, philosophical, stylistically brilliant, and non-linear; plot is treated almost as an inconsequential side-effect. Though short (121 pages in its English translation), the novel exhibits a certain labyrinthine quality as its fragmented narrative cycles and circles in upon itself. Ostensibly a man is being chased by somewhat shadowy, probably sinister, perhaps governmental, forces. The action starts on a rainy night at a symphonic concert and music plays a part in the clues necessary to piece together what is happening.<ref name=":0" />  ''The Chase'' is perhaps Carpentier's strongest novel, and easily one of the better novels written in the 20th century, though it is almost unknown in the English-speaking world in spite of MacAdam's superb 1989 translation.