Before Night Falls

Rating:
Summary: A Harrowing Tale
Review: WOW!
Horrific, Bawdy, Informative and Engrosing!
Arena's memoir certainly attests to his extraordinary life - an impoverished and surreal Cuban childhood, a Castro rebel at 16, an enemy of the state (for his homosexuality and writings), a harrowing imprisonment...and 4 years later an escape to the USA and eventual HIV driven suicide.
Before Night Falls is also an interesting overview of the underground Cuban literary scene of the 1970s. The only problems are a sometimes repetitive and preachy text (he dfinitely has an axe to grind!). Still - the rewarding story of a profoundly fascinating and important man with a voracious hunger for sex, writing, and above all freedom.

Rating:
Summary: Untitled
Review: I had seen the movie by Julian Schnabel and loved it. Here is the rare instance where the film is so much better than the book. And I realize I am bucking all the reviews, both critical and customer, bu saying that I loathed this book, for so many reasons. The writing was choppy, no event was fully realized, but only jotted down in sparse telling; there must be no less than 100 different names that may only make one sentence or at most a page or two, that have absolutely no relevance for me. Some incidents have only a sentence or two, to what purpose? And, to me the most important, Arenas does not ever put down his feelings, there is simply no depth here, only the facts, maam, and nothing but the facts. And if you believe his facts, how on earth does Cuba manage to repopulate itself, as he seems to imply that all of Cuba is gay? Sex like that is almost impossible to take literally. C'mon, in one place he had not eaten for over three days, yet he meets a man and all he can think about is having sex! Please. Yes, all he recounts is horrendous, but the best part of the book is the beginning, his childhood. And there are definitely places in NYC that one can go to to sit down and relax without shelling out a dime, for instance, had he ever heard of Central Park? I am sorry to be so critical of one whose life was mostly misery, but his writing style and choice of tales, left me cold. And made me angry, as there was so much material to work with. Page 292, however, does contain a few gems about life in America. And I am sad that he never was able (at least in this memoir) to write with any conviction about his feelings. His friends, and lovers, come and go with great regularity and rapidity, but we never know why. Did anybody touch him? And yet, I have a feeling, lurking somewhere, that I will remember this book for a while.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful novel
Review: I found this to be an incredibly moving journey through Arenas's fascinating life, terrible persecution and tragic death. While you know throughout the book what is going to happen to Reinaldo, you feel so much for him as a person that you wish you could go back and change history. The most tragic part is that this beautifully written book is a true story.

Rating:
Summary: AMAZING!!!
Review: Very simply...this is an amazing book. Both informative and compelling, Arenas draws you in like few can and doesn't let you go until long after you've devoured the last page. I couldn't put it down!!!

Rating:
Summary: Negotiating Identity
Review: Reinaldo Arenas' autobiographical novel, Before Night Falls, is a fusion of reality and impressionism in which he negotiates his own identity in the face of violent political repression. In a country in which homosexuality it not illegal, Arenas explores a culture that demands public conformity but permits private deviation. The novel interweaves his personal journey from his country home through his revolutionary teenage years to his subsequent political persecution and imprisonment and his eventual escape from Communist Cuba in the Mariel boat-lift of 1981. His description of his childhood paints a portrait of open sexuality in which no partner, neither relative nor animal, is exempt from sexual exploration. Leaving his country home as a young adolescent, Arenas moves to Havana where he finds himself swept up in the revolution and joins a circle of writers and artists. The parallel excitement of his intellectual and sexual growth is both restrained and intensified by the political repression that threatens to end them both.
The most striking element of Arenas' narrative is the Cuban conception of both sexuality and homosexuality. Living under a government that brutally represses those it considers deviate, Arenas suggests that he had sex with as many as 5,000 men while still a young man. Arenas himself classifies four sides of homosexuality in Cuba: the dog collar gay, the common gay, the closet gay, and the royal gay. From his adolescence until his daring escape from Cuba to America, Arenas encounters many masculine appearing and masculine-identified men who wanted him to play the active role in the relationship, and yet he continues to identify as the passivo. This is just one example of the way in which Arenas constantly negotiated his own self identity, as is evident when Lt. Victor "erases" him while in prison only to be recreated later
Arenas was an incredible writer, and the richness and complexity of the Cuban culture is evident in the wonderful imagery used throughout the novel, especially during his time in hiding. More of a series of scenes than a continuous story, the novel presents a detailed look at the way in which all Cubans, not just homosexuals, negotiated both a public and private identity. There is a gay machismo in the tone of Arena's prose; every trip to the beach, every walk down the street is a chance for sex. Arena clearly reveals the erotic and the literary are intertwined, as the vision of beauty and subsequent destruction is a constant throughout the novel and is reflected in his personal life as well.