El color del verano (The Color of Summer)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Color of Summer, Arenas's finest comic achievement, is also the fulfillment of his life's work, the Pentagonia, a five-volume cycle of autobiographical 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 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washinton Post Book World

The Color of Summer is as far as one can get from a flawless novel, and as close as one can hope to get, in our literary climate, to a visionary work of incomparable genius.

Publishers Weekly

Reinaldo Arenas was the cursed visionary of late 20th-century Cuban literature, imprisoned by Castro and shunned by pro-Cuba leftist intellectuals in this country after he came over in the Mariel boatlift. His open queerness shocked his contemporaries. This novel is the fourth in a cycle of five novels, dubbed the Pentagonia (the fifth in the series, The Assault, was published in 1994). It operates on a number of levels, like a noisy and particularly chaotic party. The most straightforward segment of the plot concerns the tyrant Fifo's 50th-anniversary celebration. It is typical of the grandiose, bloated Fifo that it is actually the 40th anniversary of the revolution--Fifo even lies about arithmetic. The island over which Fifo presides is a vast, groaning prison, dotted by real prisons, like El Morro, where Arenas was actually imprisoned. Fifo keeps control with an army of midgets and a flotilla of sharks that circle the island and prevent anyone from escaping. However, the island queens (mercilessly hunted by Fifo's minions, although Fifo and most of his court have dabbled in men) have been nibbling away at the base of the island, trying to unmoor it. On another level, this is Arenas's autobiography. His character has three names: Skunk in a Funk, his queer nom de guerre; Gabriel, the writer; and Reinaldo, the real person. The tripartite division of his character, and of others, entails dizzying changes of gender and jumps between levels of reality. Arenas has a nice vaudevillian touch, scattering scabrous reference to recent events and people as he bounces from skit to skit. A chapter entitled "The Confession of H. Puntilla" is modeled on the real recantation of Heberto Padilla in 1971, with anatomically impossible flourishes. Unfortunately, the flood of Cuban marginalia makes this book, at times, almost indecipherable for the non-Cuban reader. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

The fourth of Arenas s five-novel cycle (begun with Singing from the Well) and the last piece of fiction he wrote before his suicide in 1990, this is a magnificent roman clef. Lamentably, the vagaries of publishing and the translator s own timetable delayed publication of this shattering testimonial novel until after the 1999 it foretells. In honor of his 50th year in power, a Caribbean dictator named Fifo engineers a grand cultural gala featuring the greatest stars of Cuban literature. Gertrudis GUmez de Avellaneda, whose verse Cuban schoolchildren learn by heart, is resurrected from the dead but, refusing to take part in the charade, makes a run for Key West. Fifo repudiates her by having a procession of characters intone doggerel testimonials that Arenas refashions for them from the greatest lines of their prose and verse. Homosexuality, the tragicomedy of Cuban politics, the church, the mother-son relationship, salaried work, and even the weather are metaphors the author uses to portray the larger, all-inclusive struggle of power vs. freedom. The human spirit, Arenas argues, is capable of irreverent humor in even the worst situations and indeed must be given free rein if beauty is to be brought into the world. Hilarious and savagely sarcastic, this is a requisite addition to collections of Hispanic, Cuban, and gay literature. Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Siegal - New York Times Book Review

The Color of Summer is a horrible book -- monumentally, brilliantly and exquisitely horrible. ''I have suffered not only my own horror,'' Arenas writes in the foreword, ''but also the horror of all those who have not even been able to publish their horror. Not to mention that I myself will soon be dying.''...Writing, understood as simultaneously an erotic activity and a political endeavor, promised Arenas a means of transmuting humiliation into beatitude. In writing The Color of Summer, by completing it for the very last time, Reinaldo Arenas took revenge on death.

Kirkus Reviews

Fourth volume of the late (1943-90) Cuban writer's semiautobiographical "pentagony" (Arenas's word), written in 1991 as part of a five-volume sequence (The Palace of White Skunks, 1990, etc.). The rambling, free-form fantasy begins—smashingly—with a 50-page verse play, "The Flight of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda." The premise of this hilariously obscene set piece is the attempted escape to Miami of its eponymous heroine, a politically suspect poet, from the clutches of an island dictator named "Fifo"—who's celebrating the 40th anniversary of his reign (declared the 50th, because that "round number" pleases the vainglorious tyrant). Fifo orders all his late political enemies recalled to life (for publicity purposes, but also for the pleasure of murdering them again)—and Arenas is off to the races: sketching the literary and (homo)sexual adventures of several locally famous "queens" and also his own several alter egos (Gabriel, "Skunk in a Funk," et al); tossing off miscellaneous metafictional inventions ("Pensées," "Tongue-Twisters," interpolated satirical broadsides); reinventing traditional structure (the novel's Foreword appears in its midsection)—all the while subjecting Fifo's megalomaniacal posturing to elegant and devastating abuse. Examples: upon being informed that California apples can't be grown on his island, Fifo declares this agricultural injustice is another illustration of capitalist aggression; a specially bred "Bloodthirsty Shark" patrols nearby waters, sniffing out would-be emigrants; a saint (Nelly) reputed to havebeen gayis marked for "decanonization"; the assassinations of rival heads of state are accomplished via anal intercourse, with that ultimate sexual weapon, "The Electric Venus": on and on the scurrilous merriment goes. Yet beneath the grotesqueries, it's plaintively clear that the story offers (as do all Arenas's books, in some measure) "a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes . . . [have] been subjected" through the ages, and especially in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he'll be swallowing his cigars.