By Jaime Manrique. The Washington Post. Sunday, July 16, 2000; Page X04
THE COLOR OF SUMMER
By Reinaldo Arenas
Translated from the Spanish
By Andrew Hurley
Viking. 448 pp. $28.95
When I saw Reinaldo Arenas a few days before he committed suicide, the exiled Cuban author told me that among the work he had completed in the years of his deterioration from AIDS (including the extraordinary memoir Before Night Falls and a volume of poems, Voluntad de vivir manifestandose,
which contains some of the most beautiful poems written in Spanish in the last century) was his novel The Color of Summer. In Arenas's words, this was "an irreverent book that makes fun of everything." Color is the fourth installment in what Arenas called his "Pentagony." The
Assault (published in 1994) is the concluding novel in this quintet, which aims to give a history of the oppression of Cuba from colonial times to the present.
To say that The Color of Summer "makes fun of everything" is a colossal understatement. The novel is a work of savage satire, a text infused with the same kind of anger that fueled "A Modest Proposal," the essay in which Jonathan Swift recommended eating Irish children to put
an end to the great famine. Color is also a vituperative, blasphemous, demonic book that incinerates a host of icons--the Pope, Christ, Fidel Castro and Garcia Marquez are among the figures it lampoons with feral glee. And though here it is accurate to speak of the novel's excesses--verbal, sexual
and otherwise--as Rabelaisian, the true origins of Arenas's vision hark back to Greek literature and mythology.
It is no coincidence that in Before Night Falls a fugitive Reinaldo carries with him a copy of The Iliad, which he reads while hiding in the canopy of some trees until twilight falls. Arenas's infinite rage is kindred to the wrath that Achilles feels against Hector, who has killed Patroclus, his
friend/lover. And just as Achilles ties Hector's body to his chariot, dragging it until it is torn to pieces, which he then feeds to predators of land and air, Arenas in The Color of Summer wishes to do nothing less than to drag into the open and soil the corpse of the Cuban revolution, a revolution
that betrayed, persecuted and incarcerated him, thousands of homosexuals and all others who dared to dissent. The writer's sorrow is irremediable, and nothing, not even the approach of death, seems to offer any possibility of reconciliation. Literature was Arenas's religion, and just as the heretics
of centuries ago had to face the Inquisition, his ordeal was Fidel Castro's totalitarian police state.
Like the Greek satirists, Arenas is a worshiper of Priapus and Dionysus. Like them, too, Arenas intends to teach civility and to inculcate ethical values. And because Dionysus is a god of revelry, Arenas's work verges on the orgiastic. In one of his late poems, he wrote that "there's only
one place to live--the impossible," and The Color of Summer is the work of someone no longer afraid of reprisals of any kind.
The novel is composed of letters, "rewritings" of other texts, tongue twisters, poems, fables, lists, prayers, pensees, even a playlet. In all these devices, Arenas's method is irony, derision, sarcasm--though they do not prove successful in all cases. Of all the snippets that make up
the tapestry, the most inspired is the playlet at the beginning of the novel.
To celebrate his 50 years in power, Fifo, dictator of an unnamed island in the Antilles, brings back from the dead the 19th-century writer Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda who, like Arenas, was a "rewriter" of texts. When Gertrudis refuses to praise Fifo, she is subjected to an act of
repudiation and is forced to flee the island in a flimsy vessel. The writer and revolutionary leader Jose Marti also appears; he encourages Gertrudis to make it to Key West, thus incurring the wrath of Fifo and his minions. This multimedia piece, its dialogue composed in funny and brilliant
couplets, is dazzlingly rendered by the translator (if Arenas was unlucky in life, he was extremely lucky in finding a translator of Andrew Hurley's inexhaustible inventiveness; the translation is a masterpiece of that craft). Breathtaking in its fluidity and bitchery, the playlet is one of the most
technically audacious works Arenas ever wrote; its surrealist--almost dadaist--spirit reminds me of Lorca's "The Public," except that Arenas's pagan spirit is much more playful, more wicked, less dour.
The playlet is the most sustained piece of writing in The Color of Summer. Other superb highlights are Virgilio Pinera's absurdist poetry reading and his grotesque, magical realist "murder." There are also moments of sublime beauty when Arenas meditates on the history of the island,
first as a "huge colonial plantation," then "the world's whorehouse," and finally a "unanimous prison" where "people are stabbed to death as they dance." Reading this unwieldy, self-indulgent, malicious book, I waited happily for those galvanizing moments when
Arenas, writing at the top of his form, joins the company of Kafka and Woolf.
Not a novel in the conventional sense--characters don't develop, there's no discernible story line, no dramatic arc--Color is a work that will make some readers impatient with its experimentation and repetitiveness. Perhaps sensing this, in a foreword that appears in the middle of the book,
Arenas writes, "The novel never really begins or ends at any particular place; readers can begin it anywhere and read it until they come back to their starting point." (Dear reader, you would do well to follow the author's advice.)
In its uniqueness, Arenas's Pentagony reminds me of the summa of another madman/genius: the poet Ezra Pound, whose Cantos, unfair yet profound, have the same monumentality, ambition, inaccessibility--and exhibit the same lack of common sense. The Color of Summer is as far as one can get from a
flawless novel, and as close as one can hope to get, in our literary climate, to a visionary work of incomparable genius.
Jaime Manrique is a Guggenheim fellow for 2000-01. His most recent book is "Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me." He has just completed a new novel, "Senoritas in Love."
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