Farewell to the Sea : A Novel of Cuba (Pentagonia)

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Twice confiscated by Cuban authorities and rewritten from memory, this extraordinary litany of despairthe story of life in Cuba under Castrois told through the voice of a wife (who remains nameless), then through that of her husband, Hector, a disenchanted revolutionary and poet. Hector, his wife and baby vacation for six days at a small seaside cabin. There, in feverish lyrical outbursts (at times, actual poems) they each lament the loss of the freedom they had barely begun to know in early Castro years, and with its passing the loss of everything elseenthusiasm, rebelliousness and hope. Nothing except terror remains, and as it grows, Hector and his wife's relationship becomes intolerable. Under the domestic idle chatter lie their complete solitudes, a vestige of wilted love, her disgust at the messier aspects of child care, his silent fury and homosexual desire. Not even the sensuality of Hector's brief passionate encounter with the boy in the cabin next door escapes suspicion and terror. ``What have they forbidden today?''; ``How are we to behave today?''; ``What new vital instinct did they condemn today?'' are the questions that shriek in Hector's mind as the couple returns to hellish Havana. Nightmarish, at times an impenetrable tangle of myth and dreams, this is a horrifying description of life in Cuba todayand one of the best descriptions to date of life in a Communist country. It is the middle novel in a pentalogue; Viking will eventually publish all five volumes here. Foreign rights: Thomas Colchie Assoc. November

Library Journal

Arenas, expelled from Cuba in 1980, has written a splenetic indictment of totalitarianism in general and his native country in particular. The novel's first part, an interior monologue, represents the memories and fantasies of a woman on vacation with her husband and infant son. Trapped in a repressive country, saddled with an uncommunicative husband and a child she feels no bond to, she is suicidally obsessed with the idea of escape. The ocean surrounding Cuba is symbolically both her liberator and her jailer. The second part is a series of cantos which provide an explanatory gloss on the phantasmagorical narrative of the first part. The novel is imaginatively conceived, but the hysterical, shrill tone vitiates its power. Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

Michael Woods