The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights

Critics worldwide have praised Reinaldo Arenas's writing. His extraordinary memoir, Before Night Falls, was named one of The New York Times Book Review's fourteen "Best Books of 1993" and hailed by Mario Vargas Llosa as "one of the most shattering testimonials ever written." Provocative and compelling, the Cuban-born author's story has now been made into a major motion picture. The Color of Summer, Arena'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.… (more)