Pentagonia Books In Order
- Singing from the Well (1987)
- The Palace of the White Skunks (1991)
- Farewell to the Sea (1985)
- The Colour of Summer (1999)
- The Assault (1994)
Novels
- Hallucinations (1971)
- Graveyard of the Angels (1987)
- Old Rosa (1989)
- The Doorman (1991)
Collections
- Mona and Other Tales (2001)
Non fiction
- Before Night Falls (1993)
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Reinaldo Arenas Books Overview
Singing from the Well
His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather’s death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions. The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas’s ‘secret history of Cuba,’ a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.
The Palace of the White Skunks
The second novel in the Pentagonia, this is a phantasmagoric novel of adolescent rebellion and political revolution.’A beautiful, heartfelt book by a passionate and epic writer at the height of his powers.’ Oscar Hijuelos
Farewell to the Sea
In this apocalyptic vision of Castro’s Cuba, a young couple leave the dreariness of Havana and spend six days at a small seaside retreat, where they hope to recapture the desire and carefree spirit that once united them. Reinaldo Arenas is the author of ‘Before the Night Falls’.
The Colour of Summer
Critics worldwide have praised Reinaldo Arenas’s writing. His extraordinary memoir, Before Night Falls, was named one of the fourteen ‘Best Books of 1993’ by the editors of The New York Times Book Review and has now been made into a major motion picture. The Color of Summer, Arenas’s finest comic achievement, is also the fulfillment of his life’s work, the Pentagon a, a five volume cycle of novels he began writing in his early twenties. Although it is the penultimate installment in his ‘secret history of Cuba,’ it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. A Rabelaisian tale of survival by wits and wit, The Color of Summer is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.
The Assault
The author of the brilliant and highly acclaimed memoir, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas concluded his sequence of five novels at once a ‘secret history of Cuba’ and a writer’s autobiography with an allegorical satire. In The Assault, he paints a harrowing, yet at times boldly entertaining, Kafkaesque picture of a dehumanized people and the despair of an observer/narrator himself clinging to sanity. This profane narrative, filled with righteous rage, takes us on a surreal journey through a blackly humorous shadowland where philosophical discussion, homosexuality, and forgetting the words to heroic anthems are comparable crimes and a cockroach hunt makes a national holiday. With echoes of Rabelais, Swift, Orwell, and the films of Lois Bunuel, The Assault crowns the work of one of the most visionary writers to have emerged from Castro’s Cuba, a writer whom Octavio Paz called ‘remarkable…
as much for his intellectual dignity as for his talent.’
Hallucinations
In the brilliant tradition of Don Quixote and Candide, Hallucinations is a modern masterpiece of Latin American fiction. Fray Servando priest, blasphemer, dueler of monsters, irresistible lover, misunderstood prophet, prisoner, and consummate escape artist wanders among the vice ridden populations of eighteenth century Europe and the Americas, fleeing dungeons, a marriage minded female, a slaveship captain, and the Inquisition. Whether by burro, by boat, or by the back of a whale, Fray Servando’s journey is at once funny and romantic, melancholy and profound a tale rooted in history, yet outrageously hallucinatory. ‘An impenitent amalgam of truth and invention, historical fact and outrageous make believe…
. A philosophical black comedy.’ The New York Times
Old Rosa
A terrifying and beautiful novel, Old Rosa is composed of two stories that converge on a single charged point in the lives of a Cuban mother and son. In the first, the mother finds her son in bed with another boy; in the second, the son is imprisoned in one of Castro’s camps for homosexuals.
The Doorman
Arenas’s first work set in the United States breaks new ground with the story of a young Cuban refugee who becomes a doorman at a luxury apartment building. Oddly alienated from the tenants, he is seduced by their pets, who are determined to revolt against humans and human society.
Mona and Other Tales
Mona and Other Tales covers Reinaldo Arenas’s entire career: his recently rediscovered debut which got him a job at the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana, stories written in a political prison, and some of his last works, written in exile. Many of the stories have not previously appeared in English. Here is the tender story of a boy who recognizes evil for the first time and decides to ignore it; the tale of a writer struggling between the demands of creativity and of fame; common people dealing with changes brought about by revolution and exile; a romp with a famous, dangerous woman in the Metropolitan Museum; an outrageous fantasy that picks up where Garcia Lorca’s famous play The House of Bernardo Alba ends. Told with Arenas’s famous wit and humanity, Mona makes a perfect introduction to this important writer. Translated from the Spanish by Dolores Koch.
Before Night Falls
Reinaldo Arenas’ account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. Acknowledged as one of the great 20th century Cuban writers, he was born in 1943 into a poor, rural Cuban family. At the age of 15 he joined Castro’s guerrillas against Batista’s right wing regime, only to discover that repression under Castro would be on a monumental scale. He spent 20 years of his life trying to survive his ‘re education’, to safeguard his manuscripts and to maintain his sanity when he was imprisoned in El Morro prison in Havana. But, despite everything that had happened to him, including betrayal by his aunt and some of his closest ‘friends’, Arenas triumphed, finally leaving Cuba during the Mariel exodus in 1980. But America could never replace his beloved Cuba, and his anti Castro stance made him unsympathetic to many American intellectuals. ‘Before Night Falls‘ was begun before Arenas left Cuba and was completed in the last stage of his battle with AIDS, which dominated the last years of his life until he committed suicide on 7 December 1990 at the age of 47. It is a compelling and moving account of the hell Arenas experienced in Cuba and the purgatory he endured in the United States. It is a book both raw and fierce, tender and lyrical. It reveals a man of enormous vitality, resilience and courage.