Customer Rating: 
Summary: Beutiful, Glorious
Comment: My review will be quite simple, this book is... marvelous, magnificent, beautiful, brilliant, painful, poetic, and glorious. Read it!!!!!!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cuba Libre!
Comment: Anyone can put the their life on paper, but few such endeavors are worth reading. A fine memoir must come alive, must breathe, must sweat, must bleed, must become flesh and blood and acquire a `life` beyond that of its creator. A memoir worth reading (more than once) must become a Frankenstein. Reinaldo Arenas` supremely moving and magical autobiographical journey has become just that, a freakish, terrifying and stunningly gorgeous creation that will carry the memory of its creator well into the future. If Arenas had never written anything else, `Before Night Falls` would have been enough to rocket its author into the pantheon of literary greats.
When I first devoured this book more than ten years ago, it gripped me like some nagging fever. I just couldn`t put it down, nor put its collection of macabre images and revealing epiphanies out of mind. Coming back to it once again, I was amazed that its power and pathos can still hold the reader spellbound. And what exactly is the secret of its magic? The answer lays with Arenas`s unflinching desire to lay himself bare before the reader, completely shorn of the disingenuous veils through which we all like to see ourselves and be seen by others. Arenas makes no such attempt to airbrush his forty-seven years of life into a pretty portrait for posterity. Instead, he gives us what was and nothing more.
But was, was truly a life lived to the full. As full as possible within the Island prison of Fidel Castro. When the first page begins with little Reinaldo expelling a painful and ferocious stomach worm (the result of too much dirt eating!), the die is cast. Page after page, Arenas documents his impoverished upbringing within the wilds of Eastern Cuba. With his stark and matter-of-fact diction, Arenas shades nothing. Yet, through the very simplicity of his language, the images of his magical youth do achieve something of that overused phenomenon within Latin American letters, `magical realism.` Whether describing his lonely and forsaken mother, superstitous grandmother or lecherous grandfather, Arenas` tiny familial world comes alive like that of a Marquez novel. And everpresent throughout are the forces of nature, the rich, luxurious island fauna, the extremes of rain and sun and especially, the powerful and mysterious Caribbean. Throughout his life, the sea remained a mythic and revered instrument of freedom for Arenas, always enticing and prodding him to abandon his island prison, which he eventually did in 1980 with the Mariel exodus.
And in a book where the forces of nature play a central role, sexuality is omnipresent. Arenas` homosexuality was central to who he was as a man and as a writer, and he lived a life many would deem promiscuous at the very least. With seering intensity and unmatched candor, Arenas catalogues his sexual history like few have done before. From the group encounters with his childhood playmates (even a few animals) to the legions of encounters and partners in adulthood, Arenas leaves no stone unturned in documenting the importance of sex in his life. Yet, Arenas` lusty descriptions of his extraordinary erotic life are neither strictly prurient nor solely for voyeuristic thrill. Instead, one feels the palpable, if albeit transitory, joy that the erotic held for Arenas. While some parts of the book will be hard going for the puritan, the arm-chair psychotherapist will have a field day constructing theories as to the source of Arenas` grandiose appetites. Yet, Arenas` makes no excuses nor explanations for his behavior, rather he documents what was, without blinders, without shame.
Like in Kundera`s Czechoslovakia, Arenas` Cuba was/is a place of profound spiritual, emotional and physical suffering. A place where the `state` forced its way into every perimeter of human existence. Sexual expression, along with artistic expression, was the only way of asserting any individual autonomy. But even this was/is controlled and oppressed by the all-compassing arms of Castro`s revolutionary state. Arenas suffered persecution and torture for both his uncompromising sexual autonomy and for his individual artistic voice. Branded a `degenerate` and `counter-revolutionary,` Arenas paid a heavy price for his refusal to conform. Some of `Before Night Falls` most endearing and moving passages involve Arenas` internment in the infamous `El Morro` concentration camp.
While the constant references to the Cuban literary milieu and its inhabitants can confuse the reader (who informed on who!), they never wholly detract from the fluidity of the narrative nor from the power of the voice locked within. `Before Night Falls` is like a boulder rolling down a steep cliff. With each page, it only gains in intensity and ferocity.
With Arenas`decision to end his richly lived and endured years, `Before Night Falls` comes to an abrupt stop. But not end, for this is truly an unfinished work. Arenas` spirit stays with the reader long after the last word is digested, feverishly waiting for his country to catch up with him.
Arenas` last words say it best, `Cuba will be free. I already am.`
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A life of rebellion at the intersection of sex and literature
Comment: Many readers may have a difficult time getting past the first third of Reinaldo Arenas's memoir. Its opening chapters describe both the author's sexual awakening and his unorthodox (to say the least) adventures at the beaches and in the bushes and even in public restrooms in Cuba before and after the rise of Castro. "In spite of everything, youth in the sixties managed to conspire, not against the regime but in favor of life." He regales his readers both unashamedly and unreservedly with his exploits, and the more homogeneous audience members may be repelled by his homo-heterodoxy.
Yet these tales are an integral part of Arenas's message: in a totalitarian society, everything is an act of rebellion--even sex, which is often subversive and furtive and (in spite of any regime's puritanical attempt to control it) always available. For Arenas, his sexual prowess is of a piece with his literary expression, and his brave and headstrong need to write often overlap with his desire to be a gay man in a society that doesn't want homosexuals--or writers--to exist. The bulk of the book, dealing with his life as a writer, as a rebel, as a fugitive, as a prisoner, and as an exile, is identical in tone and spirit to the early passages about his libidinous youth.
His stubbornness is awe-inspiring. We read about the many times Arenas's manuscripts, often hidden in the roof or left with friends, were discovered and destroyed. Nevertheless, he would shirk off the dangers and re-create them from memory. The novels he managed to smuggle out of the country resulted in a slim international celebrity that made him a pariah of the government yet immunized him from becoming simply a political prisoner. After his arrest, he confessed to "ideological weaknesses," but his public trial was for sexual offences. "By convicting me of a common crime, they would avoid an international scandal," and the court condemned him as "a counterrevolutionary and an immoral person [who] should be sentenced for corruption of minors." (It is almost beside the point that the two swarthy "victims," both of whom recanted their testimony at the trial out of embarrassment, were hardly minors.) All of Arenas's battles were fought at the intersection of sex and literature.
Arenas has little good to say about the Batista era, but his recollections are a bracing and much-needed rebuttal to those who make apologies for the Castro regime. He reserves his bitterness especially for fellow writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alejo Carpentier who have helped prop up Castro with an aura of respectability. He reminds us that Carpentier wrote his best work (in exile) before 1959 but became part of a group of writers who "once they embraced the new dictatorship, never wrote anything worthwhile again."
Arenas begins his book with "The End," a chapter summarizing his final struggle with AIDS and acknowledging the irony that after the "thousand adversities" he suffered in Cuba, "the only escape for me was death." The paradox of Arena's life is that he finally escaped his homeland, only to die in a decade by his own hand in a dingy New York City apartment. Repression, imprisonment, and torture couldn't destroy him in a land that liberty forgot, but the fight ended once he reached the land of the free.
Customer Rating:
Summary: it aint pretty
Comment: No pretty prose passages, no magical realism, no lovable eccentrics. Thank God. This isn't Marquez or Allende. This is true life, sonny Jim, dirty, brutal, hilarious, dark and unrepentant. This is a great book filled with creations, copulations, imprisonments, escapes, knife fights, love affairs and a deep, deep love of a rich beautiful Cuba that one day Arenas hopes will be free from tyranny.
Arenas hates what Castro and his cronies did to him and the island. He shows us the secret police, the prisoners, the informers, the labor camps all in intense and sometimes horrifying detail. He levels his wrath at deluded pro Castroites in the United States and Latin America and doesnt hold back from accusing fellow writers (including Marquez, Carpentier and Paz) of being stooges of the Castro brothers.
I personally could have done without the AIDS conspiracy theories and the copious beastiality, but that doesnt detract from a terrific book.
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Summary: real people with dirt on their feet
Comment: If you're sick of cute little stories that follow some godforsaken formula, you might get some juices flowing with this book. I can count on my fingers all the books I've read that resulted in what I would call "an experience." This is one of them.
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