Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba

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Viking, 1986 - Fiction - 413 pages
Twice confiscated by Cuban authorities and rewritten from memory, this litany of despair--the story of life in totalitarian Cuba--is told through the voice of a wife (who remains nameless), then through that of her husband, Hector, a disenchanted revolutionary and poet. Hector, his wife and baby vacation for six days at a small seaside cabin. There, in feverish lyrical outbursts, they each lament the loss of the freedom they had barely begun to know in early Castro years, and with its passing the loss of everything else--enthusiasm, rebelliousness and hope. Nothing except terror remains, and as it grows, Hector and his wife's relationship becomes intolerable. Under the domestic idle chatter lie their complete solitudes, a vestige of wilted love, her disgust at the messier aspects of child care, his silent fury and homosexual desire.--From publisher description.

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Contents

FIRST
33
SECOND
54
THIRD
83
Copyright

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About the author (1986)

The novel The Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando recreates in a poetic style, in which time, space, and character move on multiple planes of fantasy and reality, the life of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a Mexican priest famous for his hatred of the Spaniards. Mier denied even that the Spaniards had brought Christianity to the New World. Arenas begins with a letter to the friar: "Ever since I discovered you in an execrable history of Spanish literature, described as the friar who had traveled over the whole of Europe on foot having improbable adventures; I have tried to find out more about you." In a meditation on the nature of fiction, Arenas discovers that he and Servando are the same person, and author and character become one.

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