Description
His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions. The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's "secret history of Cuba," a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror--and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.… (more)
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User reviews
That was the simple version of the story. In the real story, there are elves and witches and the characters constantly die and come back to life. Despite not being able to tell reality from what was surreal, I found most of the narrative mesmerizing except for the last quarter of the book which was written in the style of a play.
This is a book which was the first book of a quintet called the Pentagonia. As difficult as this story was for me to grasp, I was fascinated by the lyrical writing of Reinaldo Arenas, who was a Cuban dissident who later lived in exile and who died of AIDS at the age of 47 in New York City. I would like to read more of Arenas' work, especially Before NIght Falls, his autobiography.