Explosion in a Cathedral

Supplanting an earlier English-language edition adapted secondhand from the French, West’s translation from the original Spanish of El Siglo de las Luces (1962), restores the vivid imagery of Carpentier’s story chronicling the promise and betrayal of Enlightenment ideals as played out in the colonies of the New World. Following the fluctuating fortunes of true believer Victor Hugues, the “Robespierre of the Colonies,” who proclaims the emancipation of the enslaved inhabitants of Guadalupe while dealing death to counterrevolutionaries via that infernal machine, the guillotine. In the end, the Rights of Man prove no match for the profitable exigencies of three centuries of colonial subjugation, while Hugues’s opportunistic privateering rouses tensions between the fledgling republics of France and the United States.