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Pick of the month:
"Before Night Falls"
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"Before Night Falls," the book, was published to great fanfare in 1993. Its startling first-person account of one man's quest for freedom -- sexual, political and artistic -- shocks and dazzles with its mixture of poetic eroticism and raw honesty. "Before Night Falls," the recent film by Julian Schnabel, has also garnered great critical acclaim.
Its haunting, sexy and lush visual renderings of the book's most dramatic scenes, people and motifs are absolutely unforgettable. The movie is important in the history of "books-into-film" for another major reason: It has single-handedly revived interest in an extraordinary writer's gay life.
Read "Before Night Falls" and you get inside the head, heart and soul of Reinaldo Arenas -- the great Cuban poet, novelist, rebel, exile and lover of men. You also feel like you get inside his intensely sensual body, so utterly suffused is this lyrical writing with eroticism, even when the author is describing his boyhood in rural Cuba. His sexploits and misadventures with police officers and soldiers are vivid, and often the erotic edge is only heightened by an overarching sense of immanent danger. One of the distinct shocks and pleasures of reading this book is following Arenas on his unabashedly sexual odyssey, which interweaves his personal journey from his poverty-stricken beginnings in the 1940s to teenaged freedom-fighting for the Revolution in the late '50s, his subsequent persecution for his writing and for being homosexual, his disillusionment with Castro, his repeated imprisonment and torture and his eventual flight from Cuba in the Mariel boat-lift of 1981. As the writer Jaime Manrique (who knew Arenas in New York) says in his introduction to the new Triangle Classic Edition, this is "one of the most liberating documents ever written."
Throughout his autobiography, as throughout his life, Reinaldo Arenas was unflinching in his indictment of injustice and equally ardent in his passion for literature's freedoms. What a triumph that, at his death in 1990 from AIDS, he bequeathed to us this exquisite chronicle and moving testament to the power of the outcast, to the fight for freedom, to the enduring richness of literature. What a difference this one gay life made in the world.
-- David Rosen, Editor-in-Chief, InsightOutBooks
You can get this book, plus two more, for $3 by joining Insightoutbooks.com. Click for details.
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