Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
No Sorrow Left Unturned
By Michael Wood
The Palace of the White Skunks
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley
Viking, 356 pp., $21.95
Old Rosa
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Ann Tashi Slater, by Andrew Hurley
Grove, 106 pp., $16.95
Skunk hour, in Robert Lowell's well-known poem, is a time of jaunty, disreputable defiance. The skunks march up Main Street, ready to take over the town. They are the scavenger's answer to the poet's Miltonic despair. 'My mind's not right,' the poet says, and 'I myself am Hell.' The skunks don't say anything, they just dive into the trash, making both mind and Hell seem irrelevant, almost an indulgence. The human skunks in the work of the late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas are too depressed and depleted for any such bravado. Survival for them is not defiance, it is part of the penance, what they are condemned to. For the torment of Hell is not its pain or disorder, but its obdurate sameness. Even another Hell would be a comfort, but there is no other:
Review, 3301 words
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