The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Color of Summer; or The Garden of Earthly Delights by Reinaldo Arenas
Sophia McLennan

Reinaldo Arenas. The Color of Summer; Or the Garden of Earthly Delights. Trans. Andrew Hurley. Viking, 2000. 417 pp. $28.95.

The Color of Summer is the fourth novel in Arenas’s “Pentagony,” his own term for a series of novels that treat Cuba, homosexuality, the process of literary creation, and the struggle for individual expression. The novel revolves around a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Fifo’s (Castro’s) control of a Caribbean island. (It has actually been forty years but the dictator prefers round numbers.) In order to make the celebration perfect, the dictator has ordered the resuscitation of all of his dead enemies, including a large cohort of literary figures, so that they can properly pay homage to him before he puts them to death. This Rabelaisian tale includes an extraordinary array of characters involved in biting farce and hyperbolic sex. Characters have multiple names and identities, including references to the author himself, who is alternately Reinaldo, Gabriel, or Skunk in a Funk, depending on whether he is a writer, a son, or a queer. There are references to figures like Gabriel García Márquez as La Marquesa de Macondo or Miguel Barnet, the well-known testimonial writer, as Miguel Barniz. The references to historical and literary figures abound and may be missed by some readers less familiar with Cuban history and Latin American letters, but the extraordinary strength of the prose translation and the mesmerizing originality of the narrative are certain to captivate readers new to literature from the region. One of the most compelling features of this novel is the emotional intensity of the tale: fantastic humor is combined artfully with a profound sense of sadness, loss, and suffering. The agony of the “Pentagony” is extremely sharp, especially in the sections of the narrative that are letters from the author in Cuba to his alter ego in exile. These letters, speaking of the anguish of dictatorship and of AIDS, of personal sacrifice and loss, highlight the political postmodernism of Arenas’s work and mark the text as an extraordinary combination of pleasure and pain. [Sophia McLennan]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Color of Summer; or The Garden of Earthly Delights by Reinaldo Arenas Sophia McLennan Reinaldo Arenas. The Color of Summer; Or the Garden of Earthly Delights. Trans. Andrew Hurley. Viking, 2000. 417 pp. $28.95. The Color of Summer is the fourth novel in Arenas’s “Pentagony,” his own term for a series of novels that treat Cuba, homosexuality, the process of literary creation, and the struggle for individual expression. The novel revolves around a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Fifo’s (Castro’s) control of a Caribbean island. (It has actually been forty years but the dictator prefers round numbers.) In order to make the celebration perfect, the dictator has ordered the resuscitation of all of his dead enemies, including a large cohort of literary figures, so that they can properly pay homage to him before he puts them to death. This Rabelaisian tale includes an extraordinary array of characters involved in biting farce and hyperbolic sex. Characters have multiple names and identities, including references to the author himself, who is alternately Reinaldo, Gabriel, or Skunk in a Funk, depending on whether he is a writer, a son, or a queer. There are references to figures like Gabriel García Márquez as La Marquesa de Macondo or Miguel Barnet, the well-known testimonial writer, as Miguel Barniz. The references to historical and literary figures abound and may be missed by some readers less familiar with Cuban history and Latin American letters, but the extraordinary strength of the prose translation and the mesmerizing originality of the narrative are certain to captivate readers new to literature from the region. One of the most compelling features of this novel is the emotional intensity of the tale: fantastic humor is combined artfully with a profound sense of sadness, loss, and suffering. The agony of the “Pentagony” is extremely sharp, especially in the sections of the narrative that are letters from the author in Cuba to his alter ego in exile. These letters, speaking of the anguish of dictatorship and of AIDS, of personal sacrifice and loss, highlight the political postmodernism of Arenas’s work and mark the text as an extraordinary combination of pleasure and pain. [Sophia McLennan]

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