SOUTH AMERICA: CLARICE, ALEJO CARPENTIER

I have been in Brazil in the early evening, and the Colombian jungle at night, reading Clarice Lispector Too Much of Life and Alejo Carpentier The Lost Steps. Clarice is one of my familiars. Alejo Carpentier I have not read since the early 1970s, when I was reading and rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude and Borges' stories, 

I don't often sense a continent, even a half-continent through its literature. Europe I suppose I take for granted. People want to go to South America, I wanted to go to Macchu Picchu. I saw a picture and that the village I wanted to see, to be alone in a ruined, terraced village, looking out. Until I realised it was sold, there were queues, a problem with rubbish. I  read South America instead. Watched Fitzcarraldo. Read A Hundred Years of Solitude, again and again. Borges and Alejo Carpentier in my twenties and thirties

I liked the way they brought me on. I had a taste for what I didn't understand.

The narrator of The Lost Steps leaves City and Actor Wife, to go There, with mistress Mouche, the Colombian jungle, on a search for old musical instruments. Here. Mouche sickens in the jungle and Rosario comes forward, out of the earth. Your Woman. There. He goes further into the jungle, writing his bildungsroman, his threnody, on ever diminishing notebooks.He needs to go back to City for fresh supplies.

Clarice has enough paper. 

A work of art is an act of madness on the part of the creator. .... The madness of creators is different from the madness of the mentally ill. The latter, for reasons unknown to me, have chosen the wrong path. They are cases for doctors, while creators find fulfillment in their own act of madness.