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Summary: Expose' of contempt for human rights and dehumanization
Review: This autobiography magnifies a hundredfold the devastating impact of an excellent movie. It left me appalled at my ignorance about decades of human rights abuses and sent me searching libraries, videos (see Arenas interviewed in "Improper Conduct"), bookstores and on-line to learn more and to find out if conditions have changed (very little). Arenas bears witness to crimes against humanity, and one cannot hear his testimony and be unaffected. His other works may have better writing (he was dying as he taped this memoir), but none more moving.
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Summary: a nearly perfect autobiography
Review: A beautifully written story, and sadly tragic. If you are interested in literature and Cuban life, you will treasure the experience of reading this book. Homophobes will fail to appreciate.
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Summary: Interesting but I'm a little suspect
Review: Great story, for the most part but the writing is choppy and there are leaps of faith the reader has to take in order to make sense of the story and Arenas' choices. Gay or not, he is a sexual pig and it really starts to get boring. And I found my self questioning the validity of some of the stories.
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Summary: Honest, moving, fascinating biography
Review: Albeit, the accounts of his youth, which had hints of bestiality, took me by surprise, in all, his biography is one of the best I've read. The verbal imagery used to describe places is vivid. His honesty in expressing his sexuality, fascinating. One feels his frustrations of preserving his art and the pain of betrayal by so many of his colleagues and friends. He injects humour in unexpected places, even in the midst of horrors. For a short time, you are taken into his world and your eyes, opened.
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Summary: The moving story of a courageous, blighted life.
Review: The film version of "Before Night Falls" doesn't contain a fraction of the incident in Reinaldo Arenas' actual book. Most filmgoers will be grateful for this, for most of what happened to Arenas would be unbearable to watch on film. Here was a man--a courageous man, a true artist and a genius--who NEVER got a break in life, from the poverty of his birth to his persecution as a young man to the horrible illness that cut him down at 47. Even now, people find it hard to fit Arenas into their comfortable little molds. He was a total maverick who insisted on the utter freedom of the individual, to a point even Ayn Rand might have considered excessive. Arenas was just as appalled by the avarice masquerading as virtue that occurs so often in capitalism as he was by the bloodthirstiness masquerading as virtue which has typified Castro's Cuba and other Communist dictatorships. The tale of his sufferings in Castro's prisons is horrifying, and it is scarcely less appalling to learn that the Western publishers who grew rich from his novels refused to pay him royalties after he had escaped to America. He was only happy when seeking out sexual partners--which eventually he had in the thousands--and that automatically made him unacceptable to many who otherwise would have claimed him as a brother in ideology. Readers of "Before Night Falls" are as likely to be outraged by Arenas' own actions as by what was done to Arenas; and yet they will finish the book filled with admiration, love, and pity for a man who was, in every way that counts, a true hero. I was one of those who believed that the embargo of Cuba wasn't working, and should be abandoned; after reading Reinaldo Arenas' story, however, I'm not so smugly certain about that any more.
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Summary: GROSS blech blech blech
Review: This book just made me gag. The graphic descriptions of the author's sex with animals and, for that matter, sex with men way overshadowed the political aspect. The reviews of this book made it sound more sociological than it was. Right now I can't get the image of a bunch of boys copulating with a horse out of my head. GROSS
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Summary: Seen The Movie? Read The Book!
Review: 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 a testament to the human spirit, and the quest to break the confines of imprisonment physically as well as artistically and sexually. He relays his story with an unapologetic frankness in regards to his various sexual expolits as well as his bitterness towards Castro. I'm amazed that people manage to survive against so much adversity. After his suicide, we as readers are fortunate there's a body of work that exits, and after reading this biography,the books should be considered all the more precious for the risks it took to get them published.
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Summary: Before Night Falls
Review: It is rare for me to read a book cover to cover--somehow the book gets laid aside, but BEFORE NIGHT FALLS had me reading it passionately to its conclusion. Having seen the movie my expectation was that the book and the movie would be an overlay with more detail in the book. See the movie, but buy the book because they are two different and riveting stories. The book describes day to day life under Castro and that places this book in the same catagory of true horror stories that you encounter in John Hersey's HIROSHIMA and in Elie Wiesel's NIGHT. BEFORE NIGHT FALLS was dictated into a recording machine when Arenas was living in NYC and dying of AIDS. There is less art in this book and more punch. The book shook many of my beliefs.
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Summary: Great story but not such great writing
Review: I just finished Before night falls (I started it Saturday night and was done by Sunday night). While the story itself was fascinating, I have to say that the writing left me less than overwhelmed. His descriptions, especially of prison life and life for gays under Castro, are quite harrowing but there were other times when this book had the feeling of a kiss and tell novel. I was very absorbed in the book but mainly for the story rather then it's telling.
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Summary: Dazzling and disappointing simultaneously
Review: Early in his memoir Arenas tells the story of reciting a story for a local library competition. Arenas writes of the judges, "They were impressed, not by my skill in telling the story but by the story itself." To some extent, that stands as a pretty fair assessment of my own reaction to BEFORE NIGHT FALLS. The story of Arenas's life is remarkably astonishing: born into abject poverty, he experienced the tremendous horrors of life in castro's Cuba as a dissident writer, was enslaved by the state in order to work in sugar plantations, jailed for his writings and sexual behavior, and then managed to escape to the USA as a Marielito where he remained in relative poverty and was ultimately struck down by AIDS. While the story itself is absolutely spellbinding, the telling of it is not. Arenas's persona comes across at times as spectacularly grandiose, and the litany of the prizes he won for his writing (or of those he lost only because of the judges' political biases) gets a bit wearisome. So too does his recounting of his erotic adventures, which are often quite funny but become so prodigious and repetitive they eventually become tedious. And his insights into sexual mores and political realities seem very blinkered and Manichaean: there's very little nuance to be had in Arenas's vision of the world. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book just for the glimpse it offers of an operatically intense life experienced under tremendous hardships and injustices.
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