To Eden & Back

THE LOST STEPS (278 pp.)--Alejo Carpenfier--Knopf ($3.75).

Rare is the urban man of the 20th century who has not dreamed of a return to a life more innocent and less complicated. A weekend of fishing will answer for some. Others dream of a chicken farm when the annuity begins to pay off. The lucky ones actually buy an island in the Caribbean or off the coast of Maine. But they seldom stick it out. For the tragedy of the modern Robinson Crusoe is that he cannot seem to shake off the hold of modern life. Was primitive man really happier? Is contemporary civilization really a flop? One of the finest fictional forays toward an answer is The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban-born writer who now lives in Venezuela.

Carpentier's hero is a Manhattan musician, married to a successful actress. Working for radio and TV, his relations to his busy wife reduced to brief bedroom encounters on Sunday mornings, he has turned to drink and a mistress. His chance comes when a university museum sends him to a South American jungle to search for primitive musical instruments. He takes his mistress along. But, confronted with life in the raw, the girl loses her nerve along with her complexion. What had been overwhelming sex appeal in New York now becomes whining femininity, and a native woman named Rosario, the kind who "picked up her bundle and followed her man without question," wins the hero away with a simple mixture of sex and compliance. The mistress is sent back to New York, and in a hidden valley the hero finds a new life attuned to the quiet rhythms of the good earth. When he composes, it is such music as he had never dreamed of in Tin Pan Alley. Then, when a plane spots him and comes down for the rescue, the hero makes his mistake. He feels a brief, sharp hunger for another taste of modern life. He will go back, get a divorce, clean up odds and ends and return to Rosario and his jungle Eden.

The hero does return. But Rosario is married and nothing seems quite the same. Author Carpentier, who is equipped with an elegance of perception and distinction of style that W. H. Hudson might envy, offers no final judgment. But he proves himself, even on the way to final indecision, a more rewarding guide than many a more decisive pundit.

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