Before Night Falls: A Memoir
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.83 (906 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0670840785 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-12-01 |
| Language | : | Spanish |
DESCRIPTION:
Irriverent and honest This book shocked me, comforted me, saddened me and, at the end, disappointed me. After he spends so much of the book covering this misfortune in Cuba, I felt depressed by the way the book ends (and in the city I live in, no less!).Definitely an honest, unadulterated account of one author who . Different than, but equally as good as, the film Robert Beveridge Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (Penguin, 1993)Arenas' memoir of life in Cuba has recently been made into one of the finest films extant by Julian Schnabel. Schnabel did an excellent job with the book; while his interpretation of the text was loose in places, he managed to capture in image. Seen The Movie? Read The Book! Brett Benner After seeing the movie, I was interested in reading the book to get a feel for the writers voice. I'm so glad I did. Written in almost a stream of consciousness, Arenas's telling of a gay writers life under Fidel Castro is far more harrowing that could be depicted on screen. But it's also such
. From Publishers Weekly In this powerful memoir of passions both personal and political, Cuban author Arenas ( Hallucinations ) describes his voyage from peasant poverty to his oppression as a dissident writer and homosexual. The young Arenas, in the early days of Fidel Castro's revolution, gained his literary education working at the National Library; he then joined a fervent literary cricle. Protesting Castro's support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Arenas suffered forced labor in the sugarcane fields, spent more than two years in prison after being prosecuted as a homosexual counterrevolutionary and managed to gain exile along with many other gays during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. His voracious sexuality pervades the book (numerous encounters are described), and Arenas suggests that the gay worldis instinctually non-monogamous, though he was
It is a book both raw and fierce, tender and lyrical. 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. Reinaldo Arenas' account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. But America could never replace his beloved Cuba, and his anti-Castro stance made him unsympathetic to many American intellectuals. It is a compelling and moving account of the hell Arenas experienced in Cuba and the purgatory he endured in the United States. 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. It reveals a man of enormous vitality, resilience and courage.. 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. "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 li