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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Mother's Love, July 31, 2001
This review is from: Singing from the Well (King Penguin) (Paperback)
The first novel of Arenas's "Pentagonia" ... beautiful, poignant, and at times downright frustrating. Reality and fantasy seamlessly interweave in this depiction of a boy's childhood in pre-Castro Cuba. I am having a difficult time putting into words my experience with this novel. Arenas's prose is gorgeous, poetic in its lyricism, crossing into a style that reads like a fusion between Walt Whitman and James Joyce, reminiscent of the latter particularly in the novel's final section, a mad and hallucinatory set piece that takes place during Christmas and is written completely as dialogue. There is much abuse - both physical and psychological - to be endured in these pages, yet through it all Arenas maintains a strangely uplifting tone. His descriptions of nature are stunning in their simplicity and detail, as is the relationship between the young narrator and his mother that provides the through-line around which the action of the novel centers. By its end, the reader is left moved and exhilarated, yet painfully aware that life for this boy and his mother really isn't going to get much better ... and, if we are to read the narrator as Reinaldo Arenas himself, in fact, will get much much worse. I was frequently reminded of Julian Schnabel's film of Arenas's memoir "Before Night Falls", particularly of the early childhood scenes at the beginning of the film. If you haven't seen it, it serves as an excellent introduction to the life of this amazing artist. If you have seen it, the film stands to be viewed again.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lyrical masterpiece of suffering, July 10, 2000
This review is from: Singing from the Well (King Penguin) (Paperback)
"There went my mother, she just went running out the door. She was screaming like a crazy woman that she was going to jump down the well. I see my mother at the bottom of the well. I see her floating in the greenish water choked with leaves. So I run for the yard, out to where the well is, that's fenced around with a wellhead of naked-boy saplings so rickety it's almost falling in." So begins Singing from the Well. In some respects, this book reminds me of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In Singing from the Well, we read the tale of a young boy in the poverty of pre-revolutionary Cuba, a tale in which the characters are not only the boy's family, but who are allegories for Cuba. The narrative jumps about and is mixed with both what the boy sees as real and what he fantasizes about. Reality for the boy holds violence, both at the hands of his peers and his family. So he takes solice in another reality that includes his dead cousin Celestino, who carves beautiful poetry into the trunks of trees. This is the first book in a series by Arenas that follows this boy's life during the period just before the revolution. It is a tremendously moving book, but cannot be considered uplifting. The reader who takes the challenge to read this will be rewarded.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful novel, exceptionally told., April 28, 2001
This review is from: Singing from the Well (King Penguin) (Paperback)
As a student of literature I have read my fair share of books. So far, this is my favorite. It is incredibly emotional and I found myself completely attached to the narrator. I have not read the rest of the books in Arena's collection, what he calls the Pentagonia, but now I plan to do so. Read this book! It is worth your time.
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