Before Night Falls - Hardcover

Arenas, Reinaldo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670840785 ISBN 13: 9780670840786

Publisher: Viking, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

One of the most shattering testimonials ever written on the subject of oppression and defiance (Mario Vargas Llosa)

Reading Arenas is like witnessing a bare consciousness in the process of assimilating the most universal, but powerful, human experiences and turning them into literature (Robert Gonzalez Echevarria)

A document of a particular and disturbing honesty by one of the truly great writers to come out of Latin America (Chicago Tribune)

One of the most searing satirical writers of the 20th century, a worthy successor to Aristophanes and Swift (Jaime Manrique Village Voice)

Book Description:

The heartbreaking memoir of artistic, sexual and political freedom in Castro's Cuba, with a new foreword by Garth Greenwell

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0670840785
• ISBN 13: 9780670840786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336