Translation Rights TQE / René’s Flesh

Virgilio Piñera is undoubtedly the most representative and most versatile of Cuban writers. He has also had the greatest influence over the latest generation of young Cuban authors. In September, we published his poetry collection: La isla en peso (Island in the Balance) and we are pleased to offer our readers a chance to get to know his first and perhaps his most important novel: La carne de René.

A few weeks short of his twentieth birthday, René’s father sends him to a rather peculiar school where instead of cultivating the spirit, the scholars are instructed in the affliction of the flesh. The bloody apprenticeship inflicted on the students is more akin to torture than education and culminates in a grotesque initiation rite from which René manages to escape. From that moment on, René finds himself on the run in a community driven by the flesh, both as a source of pleasure and of pain. On his endless flight, he has to keep one step ahead of the man his father sends to find him and of the disciples of the “martyrdom” he has refused. As if that were not enough, he also has to avoid the clutches of Señora Perez and her strange friends Powlavski and Nieburg. Trying to maintain his anonimity, René is forced to change jobs and ends up working in a cemetery, but he is repeatedly cornered by adepts from the Society for the Harassment of the Flesh. This purgatory will continue until René learns to accept his individual physical nature and until he begins to feel comfortable with his own flesh; only then will he be able to come to terms with his father and with himself.

La carne de René, like Paraíso (Paradise) by Lezama Lima and El siglo de las luces (The Age of Enlightenment) by Alejo Carpentier (with whom Piñera collaborated on the legendary magazine Orígenes), is essentially a Bildungsroman. In other words, it is the story of a young man’s journey into manhood, as he progressively discovers the value of life and learns to grow into the world into which he has been thrust.

Virgilio Piñera was born in Cárdenas, Cuba in 1912, and he died in Havana in 1979 shunned by Castro’s regime. He lived as an exile in Argentina for twelve years, where he became good friends with Witold Gombrowicz, among others. It was there, in 1952, that his first novel La carne de René (René’s Flesh) was initially published. Apart from being a poet, he was also well-known as a playwright, especially for his works: Electra Garrigó, En esa zona helada (In That Frozen Zone), Falsa alarma (False Alarm) and Dos viejos pánicos (Two Old Fears). As a prose writer, his most popular works were the collection of short stories Cuentos fríos (Chilly Tales) in 1956, and his novels Pequeñas maniobras (Small  Manoeuvres) in 1963, and Presiones y diamantes (Pressures and Diamonds) in 1967. An anthology of his short stories has recently been published in Spain.