Before Night Falls: A Memoir

by Dolores M. Koch (Translator), Reinaldo Arenas (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $4.11

  This is the shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, giving an account of his life as a writer and a homosexual and his struggle for freedom of expression. He describes his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, and his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift. He never really reconciled himself to life in America away from the beloved country of his birth, and committed suicide in 1990 at the age of 47, already dying from Aids.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $4.11

  This shocking memoir by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas is a book about sexual, political and artistic freedom. In Before Night Falls, Arenas recounts his journey from a poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba to his death in New York four decades later. He tells of his odyssey from young rebel fighting for the Revolution, through his suppression as a writer, his disillusionment with Castro, his imprisonment and torture, to his eventual flight from Cuba. Now a feature film starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp, Before Night Falls is a stunning testament to an individual?s urge to create against all odds.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $7.91

  Reinaldo Arenas' account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. Acknowledged as one of the great 20th-century Cuban writers, he was born in 1943 into a poor, rural Cuban family. At the age of 15 he joined Castro's guerrillas against Batista's right-wing regime, only to discover that repression under Castro would be on a monumental scale. He spent 20 years of his life trying to survive his re-education , to safeguard his manuscripts and to maintain his sanity when he was imprisoned in El Morro prison in Havana. But, despite everything that had happened to him, including betrayal by his aunt and some of his closest friends , Arenas triumphed, finally leaving Cuba during the Mariel exodus in 1980. But America could never replace his beloved Cuba, and his anti-Castro stance made him unsympathetic to many American intellectuals. Before Night Falls was begun before Arenas left Cuba and was completed in the last stage of his battle with AIDS, which dominated the last years of his life until he committed suicide on 7 December 1990 at the age of 47. It is a compelling and moving account of the hell Arenas experienced in Cuba and the purgatory he endured in the United States. It is a book both raw and fierce, tender and lyrical. It reveals a man of enormous vitality, resilience and courage.