Otra vez el mar

Pentagonía #3

by Reinaldo Arenas

Dividida en dos partes, Otra vez el mar tiene como protagonista a un joven matrimonio que consigue un permiso para pasar unos días en un lugar de veraneo. La narración transita mediante dos voces.

La primera es la de una mujer anónima, temerosa de perder a su marido, Héctor, frustrada por la carga de la maternidad e incapaz de soportar la sociedad cubana bajo el sistema comunista. Sus pensamientos, entrelazados con lo cotidiano, revelan su tormento y el doloroso amor que siente por su marido, de quien sospecha que le es infiel, sobre todo cuando un hermoso y taciturno adolescente se instala con su locuaz madre en el apartamento contiguo.

En la segunda parte es la voz de Héctor, poeta y revolucionario desencantado, la que de una forma alegórica nos habla de la vida cubana y de sí mismo. Arenas expresa así las frustraciones y la añoranza de la libertad de esos dos seres y, página a página, ilumina al lector en el laberinto de insatisfacciones y anhelos de la pareja.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Latin American, Literature, LGBT, Latino, Queer

384 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 1985

About the author

Arenas was born in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and, later, in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and literature without completing a degree. The following year, he began working at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. While there, his talent was noticed and he was awarded prizes at Cirilo Villaverde National Competition held by UNEAC (National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). His Hallucinations was awarded "first Honorable Mention" in 1966 although, as the judges could find no better entry, no First Prize was awarded that year.

His writings and openly gay lifestyle were, by 1967, bringing him into conflict with the Communist government. He left the Biblioteca Nacional and became an editor for the Cuban Book Institute until 1968. From 1968 to 1974 he was a journalist and editor for the literary magazine La Gaceta de Cuba. In 1973, he was sent to prison after being charged and convicted of 'ideological deviation' and for publishing abroad without official consent.

He escaped from prison and tried to leave Cuba by launching himself from the shore on a tire inner tube. The attempt failed and he was rearrested near Lenin Park and imprisoned at the notorious El Morro Castle alongside murderers and rapists. He survived by helping the inmates to write letters to wives and lovers. He was able to collect enough paper this way to continue his writing. However, his attempts to smuggle his work out of prison were discovered and he was severely punished. Threatened with death, he was forced to renounce his work and was released in 1976. In 1980, as part of the Mariel Boatlift, he fled to the United States. He came on the boat San Lazaro captained by Cuban immigrant Roberto Aguero.

In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS; he continued to write and speak out against the Cuban government. He mentored many Cuban exile writers, including John O'Donnell-Rosales. After battling AIDS, Arenas died of an intentional overdose of drugs and alcohol on December 7, 1990, in New York City. In a suicide letter written for publication, Arenas wrote: "Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression that causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life... I want to encourage the Cuban people abroad as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom... Cuba will be free. I already am."

In 2012 Arenas was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people

Reviews

[Mariane · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Before Night Falls, I had to read all of his books. Cuba... oh Cuba...

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel set in 1980's Cuba focuses on a married, closeted gay man. It is written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness that made it very hard to read. It jumps around from the couple vacationing (though in humble circumstances) at the beach with their infant, the husbands erotic homosexual fantasies, and discontent with the Cuban system, government and regime. As this is almost 500 pages long, after 75 pages I gave up. The writing style was hard to fathom and the subject matter while familiar, too elusive. Life is too short for some books.

[Jarod Roselló · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be the best book I've ever read. Arenas might be the best writer who's ever lived.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Farwell to the Sea," Arenas continues his Pentagonia series by departing from the hallucinatory violence presented in the first two books ("Singing from the Well" and "Palace of the White Skunks") and entering the minds of a young married couple spending a week by the sea. Divided in two parts, the first part is the stream-of-consciousness narrative by the unnamed woman who resents her baby, fears losing her husband, and who feels helpless to cope with the communist society in Cuba. She aches for her husband's love, yet is suspicious of his infidelity, particularly when a handsome and taciturn teen-aged boy arrives with his loquacious mother and moves into the cottage next to theirs. Her dreams are mixed into her daily conscious narrative and reveal her anxiety, torment and fears. In one dream with sexual connotations, she sees visions of Greek warriors slaughtering each other in a violent orgy-like battle. And in another vivid rendition of the ubiquitous cue of the communist life, Cubans stand morosely in line while soldiers stand nearby, gunning down anyone that dares defies them or attempts to alter the cue.

The second part is from the husband's, Hector, perspective, but it's primarily told in poetic form and involves often allegorical portrayals of how he sees Cuban life and his own. His resentment underscores much of his tale, even his attraction to the boy next door, which becomes a central conflict during his stay. He longs for the boy and to freely express his homosexuality, yet feels the omnipresent oppression of the communist system as it systematically stifles all that is human. Perhaps one of the most poignant passages is the following poem in which Hector expresses what the communist system has done to his and everyone else's humanity: "You are no longer a man who calls things by their name -- you blaspheme. You are no longer a man who laughs -- you jeer. You are no longer a man who hopes -- you mistrust. You are no longer a man who loves -- you accept. You are no longer a man who dreams aloud -- you are silent. You no longer sleep and dream -- you are sleepless. You are no longer one who is wont to believe -- you consent. You are no longer a seeker -- you hide." And then he adds the line (not 30 yet) to signify how communism has jaded him and turned him into a hopeless cynic while still a young man.

Beautifully written, and a tale that will bear repeated readings.

[Simon Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Farewell to the Sea has the deepest, most prolix relationship with the ocean of any book I've ever seen. It is the book you would give someone who had never seen the ocean, if you wanted them to understand what it feels like to be near, to be in and to be surrounded by the sea. To see the sea in this novel as a metaphor, symbol, whatever, is to belie the endless intrusion of the ocean as an actual character in the novel, albeit one who is silent and ever-present. The way the sea is addressed is expectedly quite different when described by the anguished poet Hector or the nameless wife--the former has a relationship with the sea based on its eternal qualities, while the latter seems to use the sea as a calming, meditative environment to escape the anxiety of her marriage, her mother, and the political environment of 60s Cuba.

That anxiety is well characterized by the constant stream of disorganized thoughts that come from her, thoughts which only seem to organize around a coherent theme during her allegorical fever-dreams, which revolve around violence and aggression but nonetheless tell of a more pure emotion than the constantly changing concerns of a new mother with a baby, dominating mother, and husband with his iron in another fire. It's unsurprising she finds such a queer solace in dreams, given the quality of her waking life and its propensity to exploit her insecurities.

[José · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Aún entre el aire y el muro que se nos abalanza puedo ver, otra vez, el mar.”

El tercer libro en la pentagonía de Arenas, la primera parte es cronológica, estructurada, narrativa y sigue los pensamientos de una mujer anónima. La segunda parte es alucinante, poética, con una estructura libre y son el testamento de un hombre desilusionado. Los personajes más importantes son el mar, omnipresente, amigo y amenaza, y por otro lado, el monstruo en forma a veces de dictador, a veces de isla.

[Diego De la cruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una lectura dolorosa y que cala mientras más hojas vayamos pasando.
La infancia o primeros capítulos, complicados de leer por ciertas cosas narradas... Pero las cosas que este libro hace sentir y la sensación que deja al final, en esa última línea sabiendo la vida de Arenas, increíble.

[Fabrizio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este libro es una obra de arte. La primera mitad es para 5 estrellas o más. La segunda me pasó por arriba y me costó mucho seguirla.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the introduction, by Thomas Colchie. I also liked the idea of reading fiction written after the revolution in Cuba. And the fact that the book was disappeared, confiscated, and finally smuggled out and published in Barcelona was a real draw. I liked the first half better than the second half, although while I was reading the first half, I was hoping the second half would be better. [spoiler alert - next paragraph]
First half - I got used to the presentation of events as non-linear, so that the drive to the beach took place at the same time as the [spoiler alert] runaway during the pregnancy and the [spoiler alert] death of the young man. But the repetitive long references to dinosaurs was tedious, as well as the long recitation of dreams. (The good part is that reading these dream sequences conjured for me a perfect picture of Nathan Englander at the Sixth & I Synagogue at the release of his excellent short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, explaining advice someone gave him - "No one wants to read about your dreams. No one wants to read about your characters' dreams." The point being: If you have something to say, just say it.) I think this book might be good for people who have nothing to do and wish they had a long rambling book to read aloud slowly, so as to take up some time.
Second half - rant, diatribe, tirade, some in poetry form. I prefer storytelling. There were some glimpses of life in a work camp, dissatisfaction with the leader of the revolution (monster), and passages showing the corruption power permits, even for revolutionaries. Plus lots of passages about sex that weren't sexy - maybe they were about how the monster ravages the people.
Can't wait to go to book group on Saturday and let the others explain this book to me.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you approach this book with patients you will be rewarded with a deep feeling of what it was like being in Cuba through Arenas’ brilliant ability to make you hear, taste and touch the conditions of the island. This is an absolutely amazing piece of literature.

[Juan Fuentes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dos vidas de infinita tristeza. Una resignada a una vida sin amor. Otra condenada a una ocultación perpetua.

Un libro maravilloso.

[Yamid Zuluaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una novela delirante, enloquecida y llena de un dolor profundo por la falta de libertad. Reinaldo Arenas nos cuenta las condiciones de vida en una Cuba sumida en un régimen fuerte y censurador.

[Ronald Wilcox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stream of conscience writing style made it very hard to read and digest at times. Poetry was very good. Some brilliant writing in sections, other parts a chore to get through. Definitely only recommend for someone who is already a fan of the author’s works

[Glass River]

Born in Cuba in 1943, Reinaldo Arenas was one of the expelled ‘Marielitos’ who came over to the US in 1980, living there until his suicide in 1990. Castro’s main aim in enforcing the mass emigration was to punish his American persecutors by emptying the contents of his jails and lunatic asylums on them (this is the background to Brian de Palma’s 1983 film Scarface). In his gift package there were also some dissidents and awkward writers – notably Arenas – who took literary advantage of their new country. For Arenas it meant a double freedom – he was gay, which was something persecuted in his own country. Suffering from Aids, Arenas committed suicide in New York in December 1990. He left a noble last note for publication. It stated:
Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life . . . There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro . . . Cuba will be free. I already am.
A film, Before Night Falls, was made of Arenas’ life, exile, and death in 2000. Directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Javier Bardem, it is regarded as a classic of modern gay cinema.
Farewell to the Sea is the middle volume of a five-part work of Himalayan scale, the Pentagonia – a literary Pentateuch conceived as a secret history of Castro’s Cuba. It serves as a useful sampler for those intending to scale the whole; few, I suspect, will be tempted by that fictional Everest. But this portion, like the Russian samizdat, witnesses to how – despite all oppression – fiction will find a way to the light. Subtitled ‘A Novel of Cuba’, Farewell to the Sea might more accurately be called ‘a novel in spite of Cuba’. A stark epilogue records the manuscript’s trials. The first version of the book was stolen in Havana in 1969; the second version was confiscated by the Cuban authorities in 1971; a third version was smuggled out of the country (some six years before the author himself could escape) in 1974. It was published in Spanish in Barcelona in 1982 and finally this fourth version (translated by a professor of English at San Juan) became available to the English-speaking world in 1987. Farewell to the Sea has a tiny plot buried under an overgrowth of prose poetry. As far as I can make out, it goes like this. Hector and his wife take a cabin by the seaside for six days. They have their baby boy with them. Their aim is to recover the spirit of their early marriage. Hector is a poet, a disillusioned revolutionary and, it emerges, a covert pederast, a life-sentence crime in Cuba. His wife suspects that he has already visited the resort without her. In the course of the week Hector has an affair with a young boy in a neighbouring cabin, who commits suicide when he realises the bleak future for homosexuals in Castro’s regime. The novel ends with the now entirely uncommunicative couple driving back to Havana.
A plot summary cannot convey the heroic effort that Farewell to the Sea demands from its reader. The narrative is divided into two separately introspective sections. The first is the wife’s day-by-day stream of consciousness. Each of the six mornings starts with a factual observation of the world around her, and ends with an apocalyptic reverie as she drifts into sleep. She is, apparently, ‘done with words for good’ and consoles herself with glum stoicism: ‘I must accept my existence, as others accept an incurable disease.’ Her dull resentments against the revolution are inarticulate, but insistently talkative and nag away interminably. The second half of the novel is a 230-page-long Whitmanesque poem in six cantos which Hector has composed, presumably in his mind. It is obsessively homosexual and varies relatively lucid scabrous fantasy with wild flights like the following:
swallows were gliding
fornicating above the ocean
More poetic than ornithologically plausible, perhaps. Like the sea on a cold day, this is a book to dip into rather than hang around in.

[Bárbara Ggm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Al terminar, él me sirve un vaso de agua, y yo, al ver el agua cayendo dentro del vaso, siento lástima por esa agua tan dócil, tan pobre, tan poca, tan obediente, tan mansa: no puedo concebir que esa agua que está ya en el vaso, que toma los colores y la forma del vaso, que pasa del botellón a la jarra, de la jarra al vaso, no puedo concebir que ese poco de agua haya formado parte de un río, haya atravesado la tierra en grandes manantiales, haya navegado sobre el cielo, haya sido mar, rocío, tormenta, nube.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written with a mixture of poetry and prose. At times a little confusing and just plain odd, but then he hits the reader with profound statements about life, love, death and politics. A challenge to finish but the parts that are good will stick with you for a long time. Favorite quote from book
"Man is truly a product of Machiavelliasm distilled, for knowing that infinity exists he is yet the only being who knows himself finite"

[Maria Maniaci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, gorgeous prose. The man has a way with rhythm.

[Lina]

My favourite

[Michael Beblowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Farewell to the Sea, the scandalous novel that Reinaldo Arenas wrote three times, one version was confiscated, another lost, and a third eventually smuggled out of Cuba and published in Barcelona in 1982, is a staggering artistic achievement that should be celebrated as a masterpiece of Latin-American literature. Why Arenas never enjoyed the international popular acclaim of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes or other latinx magical realists is partially related to his sexual orientation, partially related to the academic or intellectual glorification of socialism and communism as a radically egalitarian ideology and the perception that any historical evidence of its oppression betrays reactionary residual cold war resentment and democratic bias, and partially related to the inventiveness of the dense, postmodernist prose/poetry. Hector, his wife (and cousin) and their months-old son, spend six days vacationing outside Havana trying to reignite the passion and promise of their revolutionary youth. Numbed by the reality of widespread denunciations, incarcerations, forced labor, suicides, rationing and scarcity, the young couple spend six estranged days together, isolated by their dramatically different perspectives. The stream of consciousness prose of the wife told in single paragraphs that smoothly transition between dream, memory and present observation, contrasts with the modernist poetry of Hector's Cantos, which repudiate Walt Whitman, imagines the cruising and murder of desperate "queen" Eachurbad, the plight of a widowed laborer forced into prostitution by the system, and a prison camp cook incarcerated for his homosexuality trying to avoid the abuse of men who work in the field during the long days and viciously sodomize him at night. Farewell to the Sea recalls Death in Venice, but told from the perspective of a suspicious wife who fully understands the power that a beautiful adolescent rival exerts over her husband while resisting to ever acknowledge those implications and the husband dissatisfied with the suppression that forces his poetry to remain unpublished and for him to conceal his "counterrevolutionary" desires behind traditional matrimony, instead of finding freedom in the arms of a young man Hector finds another bitter prison. When you live on an island how can one bid "farewell to the sea" and its haunting simultaneous promise of escape and imprisonment?

[Sandra]

Farewell is the story of a young couple aspiring towards their individual freedom, and at the same time holding each other hostage inside their relationship.

While the female protagonist’s vivid dreams (or nightmares, as one might subjectively describe them) and her impending sense of losing herself entirely inside her mind while also losing the affection of Hector, her boyfriend, are well-written and grasped my attention at first.



The novel begins with the two driving along the seaside and while Arenas’ descriptions of Cuba’s political, moral and financial decline are excecuted with an intensity that evokes empathy and despair, the novel gets out of hand when the expressionist visions of the female protagonist wholly take over the novel.

The matter of the fact that those two are in a hopeless situation is interesting, as is Hector’s loss of identity, as is the woman’s sense of logging off – however, if those were the aspects the novel actually focused on, not dragging the reader through endless nonsensical visions of orgies between Greek gods or repeatingly showing nameless demons fighting each other, the story in itself would be interesting to follow.

While I find Arenas to be a very inspiring and interesting individual and a very important influence for Latin American literature, I would only recommend this novel to devoted fans of Joyce, Faulkner and the likes.

My weekly book and movie blog: https://sandrafalke.wordpress.com

[brunella · Rating 2 out of 5]

la sinopsis es una mentira.
odio como esta narrado. la primera parte, desde el pov de la mujer, no se entiende nada. no hay casi divisiones de parrafos, no hay manera de distinguir claramente cuando es el presente, cuando es el pasado y cuando es un delirio o un sueño. no cuenta nada y transmite muy poco, no veo la finalidad.
la segunda parte es mejor, pero tampoco cuenta mucho. al menos, con las pseudo poesias del hombre, busca hacerle llegar al lector con las metaforas de la dictadura y creo que esta bien logrado.
creo que es un libro para un club de lectura o para tratar en alguna materia de literatura para poder analizarlo y tratarlo minuciosamente. fuera de eso, dudo que muchos puedan disfrutarlo.
no es para mi y tampoco lo recomiendo

[Carlos Díaz Reyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

En esta novela seguimos a un matrimonio, desde el interior de sus pensamientos: la primera parte es la de la mujer y su tristeza por amar a un marido secretamente homosexual; la segunda es la del hombre y habla más de Cuba y el infierno de vivir ahí. La primera parte es narrativa más convencional en prosa, aunque hay partes de sueños (mis menos favoritas). La segunda es una locura que va de la prosa poética al verso; palabras en diagonal, moviéndose, repitiéndose o siendo una sola frase en medio de la hoja; estamos de verdad dentro de la cabeza del marido. Hace mucho que no leía una novela tan extensa, es un libro conmovedor en su poesía y la carga inmensa de tristeza y rabia. Una épica del horror cubano.

[Nicolas Giovanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Que travesía más compleja! Dice Héctor sobre el final del libro: “Ah que difícil fue llegar, partir”. Y pienso que resume un poco la experiencia de lectura. Por momentos me maravilló su escritura barroca, rebelde, descordada, visceral; pero también me agobió, me parecieron excesivamente repetitivas algunas partes. La segunda mitad del libro tiene pasajes maravillosos y a la vez se me hizo insoportable. La crítica al régimen también me hastió. De todos modos, vale la pena leerlo aunque sea salteando páginas o aunque lleve tiempo.

[Jared Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pushing magical realism towards grounded absurdity. As if the upward whirling feeling in One Hundred Years of Solitude were not enough and Arenas needed to push us into orbit, rarely coming back to the plot. Enjoyable for the first half, but the second half I could not finish. Too many unconnected thoughts that he attempted to sew together into a 200 page poem. Nope.

[FRANCISCO PERALTA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es mi libro favorito, este año lo leí por tercera vez y sigo descubriendo tantas cosas en él como el primer día.
Me encanta la manera en que escribía Reinaldo Arenas y como creaba tales personajes, como la mujer de esta increíble novela.

[Alejandro Higuera Sotomayor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Escrito 3 veces para generar fascinación, repudio, admiración y hastío. Una prosa llena de alegorías, un grito desesperado que narra el sufrimiento y el desencantamiento de la revolución. Un descubrimiento que se hace más rico si se ha leído "Antes de que anochezca". Hermoso.

[Meli Berta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un hallazgo. Lo compre por el título y me pareció muy bueno. La historia se cuenta de forma indirecta: entre recuerdos, sueños, pensamientos y poesía; lo que me resultó novedoso aunque algunas partes, sobre todo la de los sueños, me resultaron pesadas.

[Oliver Terrones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esa obsesión de la escritura de Reinaldo Arenas por los hombres en shorts. Reí mucho con el último tercio del libro; tan joto. Del resto: las penurias de las sanciones de la OEA a Cuba. Me quedo co muchs de sus poemas prosaícos largos.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un monumento a la desesperación

[B Frizz · Rating 3 out of 5]

did not understand the ending but i enjoyed trying to get it