close
The Lost Steps Audiobook, by Alejo Carpentier Play Audiobook Sample

The Lost Steps Audiobook

The Lost Steps Audiobook, by Alejo Carpentier Play Audiobook Sample
FlexPass™ Price: $17.95
$9.95 for new members!
(Includes UNLIMITED podcast listening)
  • Love your audiobook or we'll exchange it
  • No credits to manage, just big savings
  • Unlimited podcast listening
Add to Cart
$9.95/m - cancel anytime - 
learn more
OR
Regular Price: $20.95 Add to Cart
Read By: Caleb Summers Publisher: Penguin Audio Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 7.33 hours at 1.5x Speed 5.50 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: September 2023 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9780593670262

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

45

Longest Chapter Length:

31:47 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

21 seconds

Average Chapter Length:

14:36 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

3

Other Audiobooks Written by Alejo Carpentier: > View All...

Publisher Description

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura

A Penguin Classic


Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download and start listening now!

"Penguin Classics has recently published sensational new translations of two of Carpentier’s novels, The Lost Steps (1953) and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). . . . What made them influential, and makes them so dazzlingly readable still, is their style. . . . Needless to say, this marriage of style and subject would be illegible to English-language readers without a first-rate translator, and in Adrian Nathan West, Penguin Classics has found their man."

— The Wall Street Journal

Quotes

  • An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of riches—stylistic, sensory, visual.

    — The New York Times Book Review
  • Extraordinary.

    — The New Yorker
  • The greatest novel to have appeared in Latin America in our time.

    — Le Figaro Littéraire
  • Beautiful and stirring . . . One of [Carpentier’s] finest works . . . which for many readers is the most alluring of his novels.” ―Leonardo Padura, from the Introduction

  • An absolutely magnificent piece of literature . . . The prose is mesmerizing, and it’s one of those books where I just want to have it tattooed on me in its entirety to keep with me forever.

    — BuzzFeed
  • The most remarkable translating feat I encountered in 2023 comes courtesy of Adrian Nathan West, who in The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral brings the almost orgiastically baroque prose of Alejo Carpentier into glorious English.

    — Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal, via Twitter
  • Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature. . . . His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite. . . . The mannered intensity of Carpentier’s language—maintained at fever pitch by West—propels the reader. . . . Every sentence in the novel [is] freighted with learning and a passion for high art. . . . What the reader takes away overall from West’s translation is a freshness and bite and aesthetic ambition that match Carpentier’s.

    — Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
  • The grace and energy of [this translation] are of a high standard.

    — The Bulwark
  • Runner-Up for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize

The Lost Steps Listener Reviews

Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!