Singing from the Well

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Viking, 1987 - Fiction - 206 pages
This first novel in Arenas's "secret history of Cuba" -- a quintet he called the Pentagonia -- is a powerful story of growing up in a world where nightmare has become reality, and fantasy provides the only escape. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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About the author (1987)

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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