The Enchanting World

10 hrs. 46 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Reinaldo Arenas

Narrator Mikhail Roslyakov

Description

This is a cheerful, carefree, swashbuckling, fantasist novel: it recreates not only the life of an exceptional man, but also the contradictory, astonishing world in which he was destined to live.

Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) was a Cuban poet, prose writer, and playwright, a participant in the Cuban Revolution, and an activist of the literary underground. Arenas’s novel “The Enchanting World” (1965) is an imagined autobiography in which the author is a part of the depicted character. Having spent much time studying the life of the prototype of the main hero—the brother Servando Teresa de Mier—Arenas became convinced that with his own idol he shares endless rebelliousness, skepticism, and a hunger for freedom. Arenas’s experimental writing, full of wit and inclined toward baroque exaggerations, does not allow the character to be unambiguously divided into “Reinaldo” and “Servando,” yet it invariably proclaims the victory of poetry over logic in the lives of both—thanks to or despite the persecution and flight. This eccentric novel will not disappoint admirers of Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel Ángel Asturias—writers whose influence Arenas experienced.

The manuscript of “The Enchanting World” was not allowed to be published by censors, and Arenas’s friends smuggled it out of Cuba illegally. In 1968 a French translation was published; a year later, in Mexico, the novel was released in Spanish.