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Book Review of Reinaldo Arena’s “Viaje a la Havana”

HAVANA TIMES – Some books recount a journey. Others succeed in taking the reader along with them. Viaje a La Habana* by Reinaldo Arenas belongs to that latter group. Published in 1990 and subtitled “Novel in three journeys,” the work brings together three different tales: Que trine Eva [“Let Eva sing”]; Mona;and Viaje a la Havana [“Journey to Havana”]. The three parts can be read independently, but when viewed as parts of a single journey they acquire a new dimension.

Arenas was born in the community of Aguas Claras, in Holguín, Cuba, in 1943, but he moved to Havana at a very young age. There he worked at the Jose Marti National Library and began a literary career that would lead him to publish, among other works, Celestino antes del alba [originally published in 1967, reissued in English in 1988 as “Singing from the Well”].

In 1980, he left Cuba as part of the Mariel exodus and eventually settled in New York. By the time he wrote much of Viaje a La Habana, he carried with him that experience of displacement, but also an increasingly intense connection to the memory of the city he left behind. He died in New York in December 1990.

This biography doesn’t provide any real explanation of the novel. Instead, in a sense, Arena’s life is embedded within the book. He divides himself among his characters – their voices, and their obsessions; he transforms recognizable experiences into fantastical, grotesque, or deliberately exaggerated situations. Reality never appears intact – it’s distorted, until it takes on another truth.

Perhaps therein lies the book’s greatest audacity: Arenas can exaggerate, invent, and carry

a situation to the point of absurdity and yet evoke a sensation of truth difficult to ignore.

In the first book, Que trine Eva, Eva and Ricardo cross Cuba to the island’s extreme eastern tip. Their obsession with fabrics and creating extravagant garments converts their trip into a kind of flight within the bounds........

© Havana Times