The Pentagonia is the collective title of a series of five novels by Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. It was subtitled by its author "the secret history of Cuba." The novels were written from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, and indeed, as was recounted in Arenas's autobiography Before Night Falls, were rewritten many times as manuscripts were lost, destroyed, and/or confiscated by Cuban authorities. Each of the novels is semi-autobiographical and has Arenas as one, if not more than one, of the major characters.
Book One
The first volume, Singing from the Well, was originally published as Celestino antes del alba in 1967, the only Arenas novel to be published in Cuba. The book recounts the history of a young child, Celestino, growing up in the province of Oriente, Cuba. Celestino was a child ostracized by his family because of his literary talents. He would write on trees and in retaliation his grandfather denuded the forest.
Book Two
The second volume, Palace of the White Skunks, focuses on adolescent Fortunato who was raised in a house of frustrated aunts, a primal grandmother, and an emasculated grandfather. Set during the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the novel follows the main character as he clumsily joins the rebels. The acclaimed editor, Thomas Colchie, has written, that in this work, “Arenas has created a haunting family portrait, combining the lyrical empathy of a Tennessee Williams toward his characters’ troubled lives with a radically fractured narrative that pays dark tribute less to Faulkner than to the schizophrenia of life under any dictatorial extreme.” (Colchie 2001)
Book Three
The Third volume, Farewell to the Sea, is a divided novel, telling the story of a married couple on a six-day vacation on the Cuban coast. The first half is a prosaic stream-of-consciousness narrative of the troubled wife demonstrating her love and inability to understand her husband, Hector. The last half of the novel is composed of six poetic cantos sung in silence to the sea by...
