Mona and Other Tales

Reinaldo Arenas. Mona and Other Tales. Selected and trans. Dolores M. Koch. Vintage, 2001. 190 pp. Paper: $12.00. Regardless of what some may say in this age of content over form, there is a melody to some prose that announces to the reader that the melody-maker is a lyricist of significant measure. Such are the songs sung by Reinaldo Arenas in Mona and Other Tales. There's a line in the story "The Glass Tower" in which the narrator says of the protagonist (Alfredo Fuentes, a Cuban novelist in exile) that there were those who were "critical of his facile eloquence." In that phrase, "facile el...