Color of Summer, or the New Garden of Earthly Delights

The final work from "one of the few truly great writers to come out of Latin America in this century" (Chicago Tribune)

Critics worldwide have praised Reinaldo Arenas's writing. His extraordinary memoir, Before Night Falls, was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the fourteen "Best Books of 1993" and was hailed as "one of the most shattering testimonials ever written" by Mario Vargas Llosa. His fiction "reveals a profoundly original writer . . . Reading Arenas is like witnessing a bare consciousness in the process of assimilating the most universal, but powerful, human experiences and turning them into literature" (The New York Times Book Review).

The Color of Summer, Arenas's finest comic achievement, is the fourth novel in a quintet he called the Pentagonia. Although it is the penultimate chapter in his "secret history of Cuba," it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. (The final volume, The Assault, was written first and published in 1994.) A Rabelaisian tale of survival by wits and wit, The Color of Summer is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.