Singing from the well

by Reinaldo Arenas

Paper Book, 1987

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)

Status

Available

Call number

863

Publication

New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin Books, 1988, c1987.

Collection

User reviews

LibraryThing member alexleonard
Fantastically surreal this book jumps from factual descriptions to complete fantasy from one word to the next and paints an amazing picture of a child's difficult upbringing in Cuba, where the only release is to escape from reality.
LibraryThing member SqueakyChu
It's hard to know what to say about this novel. On one hand, it was a deeply engaging novel about a boy, his cousin Celestino, his mother, his Grandma, and his Grandpa. On the other hand, it was a story that I didn't quite understand but felt compelled to read to completion. The story, as much of
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it as I undestood, was about a boy in Cuba who was brought to live with his grandparents because his mom had no husband. His cousin Celestino, whose own mother was no longer alive, was dropped off into this household as well because Celestino's father no longer wanted him. The family was very poor, subsisting on corn, eggs, plaintains, wild pineapples, star apples, roasted pig for Christmas, and water brought from the river and stored in a crock. Their house with a thatched roof was in constant disrepair and always at the verge of falling down.

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.
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Language

Original publication date

1982 (original Spanish)
1987 (English: Hurley)

ISBN

014009444X / 9780140094442
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