Old Rosa

Reinaldo Arenas has been widely praised for his prodigious, explosive talent. A terrifying and beautiful novel, Old Rosa is composed of two stories that converge on a single charged point in the lives of a Cuban mother and son. In “Old Rosa,” we meet Rosa as a young woman, tall, proud, shrewd, always in control. But her world begins to crumble when her oldest son runs off to join Castro’s rebels and she finds her youngest son, her “brightest star,” in bed with another boy.

The second story,...