Reinaldo Arenas by Marguerita

Bookcovers for
Singing from the Well

The Palace of the White Skunks

Farewell to the Sea

Reinaldo Arenas dualistic vision allowed him to see both sides of the coin and not flinch when it came to writing about what he saw.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes called Singing From the Well e Well "one of the most beautiful novels ever written about childhood, adolescence, and life in Cuba," but in Before Night Falls Reinaldo writes that upon meeting Fuentes he felt he was in the presence of a man who talked like a computer, full of programmed answers. Was this return of bile for generosity an appalling ingratitude?
Or was it yet another example of Reinaldo telling the truth, as he saw it, regardless?
Most of his novels, though filled with moments of exceptional brilliance and genius (at his best there's no writer alive who can touch him), are marred by rococo excesses. I find the novels' amorphous, repetitious structures often enervating. The most conventional and accessible novel he wrote, The Doorman, was also the least compelling; this defanged satire of New York and New Yorkers showed Reinaldo's imperfect understanding of North American society.

Among his books, the beautifully contained novellas Old Rosa and Arturo, the Brightest Star are chiseled jewels perfect on their own terms. His masterpieces, Before Night Falls and Singing From the Well (his first and most cohesive novel), are unassailable works that should survive. Singing is a novel of awesome lyrical purity, containing echoes of García Lorca (the women in the household are like the daughters of Bernarda Alba turned medusas) and of Juan Rulfo's ghostly Pedro Páramo. Its maturity is even more astonishing if one knows that Reinaldo wrote it when he was only 21. The novel's limpid lyricism, infused with the spirit of Hardy's and Lawrence's pantheistic views of nature, is almost sacramental in its respect for the overpowering forces of the natural world.

He was a considerable poet, too. Poetry, as in Borges's case, was his greatest love, and arguably his highest gift. His epic poem, El Central, records and re-creates the atrocities committed against the Cuban people through the ages—and does it more succinctly and more gracefully than the novels do. At least a dozen of his poems will one day take their place among the most beautiful written in Well "one of the most beautiful novels ever written aboutwritten in Spanish. Many writers have laid a claim to immortality with fewer—and less original—works.Reinaldo's most valuable legacy as a man is his bravery in denouncing the crimes committed in the name of social justice.
His point was that the brutalities committed by the left sting even more than those committed by the right.
We expect the worst from the Pinochets of this world, but we expect nothing less than utopia from an ideology that promises us the dawn of the New Man. This betrayal of the Cuban revolution fueled the rage that galvanized the life and the work of Reinaldo Arenas, and it is ultimately responsible for making him one of the most searing satirical writers of the 20th century, a worthy successor to Aristophanes and Swift.

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