Details

ISBN-10: 0140157654
ISBN-13: 9780140157659
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publish Date: 10/01/1994
Dimensions: 7.76" L, 5.09" W, 0.70" H

Before Night Falls: A Memoir

Translator: Dolores M Koch

Paperback

Price: $18.00

Overview

“Before Night Falls” is Reinaldo Arenas’s stunning autobiography – a bold and unrestrained account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. Arenas, acknowledged as one of the great 20th-century Cuban writers, 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. Reinaldo Arenas 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 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. The final irony was his battle with AIDS, which dominated the last years of his life until he committed suicide on December 7, 1990, at the age of 47. “Before Night Falls” was begun before Arenas left Cuba and was completed in the last stage of the disease. It is an extraordinary document – a compelling and moving account of the hell that Arenas experienced in Cuba and the purgatory he endured in the U.S. It is a book both raw and fierce, tender and lyrical, particularly about the Cuban landscape. In it you will discover a man of enormous vitality, resilience, and courage.

Arenas writes of his own book, “I tell my truth like a Jew who has suffered from racism, a Russian who has been in the Gulag, or any human being who has eyes to see things as they are: I cry out:therefore I am.”

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Reviews
"Dolores Koch's translation is a great achievement. She is not only accurate and faithful to the original but she even captures Arenas's flashes of lyricism and melancholy...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. Because of this, "Before Night Falls" is crucial to understanding his works. But, more important, it is a record of human cruelty and the toils of one individual to survive them." – The New York Times

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

"Any attempt to reckon with Cuba's torturous twentieth century will have to take into account Arenas's monumental work ... an essential human testimony, joyful and enraged, a triumph of conscience." – Garth Greenwell

"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

"In this powerful memoir of passions both personal and political, Cuban author Arenas describes his voyage from peasant poverty to his oppression as a dissident writer and homosexual." – Publishers Weekly

"A last testament that resonates with passion for the freedom of the human spirit and for the author's beloved Cuba: a distinguished addition to the literature of dissent and exile." – Kirkus Reviews

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Details

ISBN-10: 0140157654
ISBN-13: 9780140157659
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publish Date: 10/01/1994
Dimensions: 7.76" L, 5.09" W, 0.70" H
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