The Pentagonia is the collective title of a series of five novels by Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. It was subtitled by its author "the secret history of Cuba." The novels were written from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, and indeed, as was recounted in Arenas' autobiography Before Night Falls , were rewritten many times as manuscripts were lost, destroyed and/or confiscated by Cuban authorities. Each of the novels is semi-autobiographical and has Arenas as one, if not more than one, of the major characters.
The first volume, Singing from the Well, was originally published as Celestino antes del alba in 1967, the only Arenas novel to be published in Cuba. The book recounts the history of a young child, Celestino, growing up in the province of Oriente, Cuba. Celestino was a child ostracized by his family because of his literary talents. He would write on trees and in retaliation his grandfather denuded the forest.
The second volume, Palace of the White Skunks, focuses on adolescent Fortunato who was raised in a house of frustrated aunts, a primal grandmother, and an emasculated grandfather. Set during the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the novel follows the main character as he clumsily joins the rebels. The acclaimed editor, Thomas Colchie, has written, that in this work, “Arenas has created a haunting family portrait, combining the lyrical empathy of a Tennessee Williams toward his characters’ troubled lives with a radically fractured narrative that pays dark tribute less to Faulkner than to the schizophrenia of life under any dictatorial extreme.” (Colchie 2001)
The Third volume, Farewell to the Sea, is a divided novel, telling the story of a married couple on a six-day vacation on the Cuban coast. The first half is a prosaic stream of consciousness narrative of the troubled wife demonstrating her love and inability to understand her husband, Hector. The last half of the novel is composed of six poetic cantos sung in silence to the sea by Hector, a poet who is no longer allowed to write and who has been compelled to enter into a sham marriage to avoid the charge of homosexuality. It is a story of a marriage of two people who, while sharing genuine affection, are so different and incompatible that they not only cannot communicate, they fail to speak in the same terms, one in prose and the other in poetry.
In the fourth volume, The Color of Summer , Arenas appears as three characters: Gabriel, the dutiful "straight" son; Reinaldo, the expatriate author; and Skunk in a Funk, the "picaro" – faggot – who seeks merely to live and work as an artist in Castro’s Cuba while engaging in anonymous sex. The novel is set in a carnival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution and breaks many, if not all of the norms of narrative story telling (the "Foreword" appears on page 252). In that foreword, Arenas states that the novel is a "grotesque and satirical (and therefore realistic) portrait of an aging tyranny and the tyrant himself..." He adds that the novel “is not a linear work, but circular, and therefore cyclonic, with a vortex or eye – the Carnival – towards which all vectors whirl."
The fifth and final volume, The Assault, is a dark and Kafkaesque vision of a future Cuba, where homosexuality is punishable by death, told by a repressed homosexual turned government agent for the "Bureau of Counterwhispering" as he searches to destroy all whispers, homosexuals, dissidents and most particularly his own mother.
Writing about the entire Pentagonia, Arenas wrote, in the foreword to The Color of Summer:
In all of these novels, the central character is an author, a witness, who dies but in the next novel is reborn under a different name yet with the same angry rebellious goal: to chant or recount the horror and the life of the people, including his own. There thus remains, in the midst of a terrible, tempestuous time, a life raft, a ship of hope, the intransigence of man the creator, the poet, the rebel –standing firm before all those repressive principals which, if they could, would destroy him utterly – one of those principals being the horror that he himself exudes.
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.
Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright known as a vocal critic of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, and the Cuban government. His memoir of the Cuban dissident movement and of being a political prisoner, Before Night Falls, was dictated after his escape to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and published posthumously, after Arenas, who was dying of AIDS, committed suicide with an overdose of pills.
José María Andrés Fernando Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer, poet and essayist. He is considered one of the most influential figures in Cuban and Latin American literature. His novel Paradiso is one of the most important works in Spanish and one of the best novels of the 20th Century according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of William Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess first published in 1964. It tells the story of Shakespeare's life with a mixture of fact and fiction, the latter including an affair with a black prostitute named Fatimah, who inspires the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title refers to the first line of Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", in which Shakespeare describes his love for a dark-haired woman.
Published in 1982, Palace of the White Skunks is the second book of Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas' Pentagonia book series.
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Virgilio Piñera Llera was a Cuban author, playwright, poet, short story writer, essayist and translator. His most notorious works are the poem La isla en peso (1943), the collection of short stories Cuentos Fríos (1956), the novel La carne de René (1952) and the play Electra Garrigó (1959). He is also known for his role in the translation into Spanish of the novel Ferdydurke, by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz.
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Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art. Some of his works deal explicitly with male homosexuality and transvestism.
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Guy Hocquenghem was a French writer, philosopher, and queer theorist.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig. It depicts the daily conversations between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, Molina and Valentín, and the intimate bond they form in the process. It is generally considered Puig's most successful work.
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Guillermo Rosales (1946–1993) was a Cuban novelist. A double exile, writing in reaction both to Cuba's totalitarian regime and to the indifference of Cuban-American exiles bent on achieving the American Dream, Rosales created some of the best Cuban literature of the second half of the twentieth century, garnering comparisons to Carlos Montenegro and Reinaldo Arenas.
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Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
Roberto Valero was a Cuban poet, novelist, and educator.
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The Clapton Press is an independent publisher based in London E5, established in 2018.