Foreign correspondence

By PHILIP HERTER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

Dreams of Dreams by Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Nancy J. Peters (City Lights, $10.95)

Popular Italian author Antonio Tabucchi has written an amusing collection of the dreams of historical figures. Daedalus, Caravaggio, Freud and others have guest dream appearances in this brief, entertaining book.

Tabucchi's reconceived dreams are short, no more than a page or two and in the authors hands much livelier and more engaging than listening to the dreams of your work mates at a coffee break.

Included with this edition is a short-story entitled The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, which the author calls a delirium. Wild it is and perfectly in the spirit of the Portuguese author, who wrote under various literary disguises. In this short narrative, Tabucchi reimagines the last days of the influential Portuguese modernist.

The Color of Summer by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley (Viking, $29.95)

Subtitled, The New Garden of Earthly Delights, Reinaldo Arenas' phantasmagorial novel is part autobiographical song of myself and part satire of contemporary Cuba as if told to Hieronymous Bosch.

Arenas, who came to the United States with the Mariel boat lift in 1980 and died in 1990, populates his narrative with cross-dressing soldiers, harlots and hussies. The characters go to extremes searching for freedom from a government determined to keep them imprisoned. Trained sharks patrol the coasts of their island paradise, and sexy police squash any dissent. The players pause in their quest for total liberation only long enough to skewer a certain bearded leader, nicknamed Fifo.

Richly textured and theatrical, The Color of Summer is the fourth in Arenas' pentagony -- a series of five novels illuminating his life in light of Cuban history. Sweeping in scope, the author's vision only rarely gets the best of his storytelling. Andrew Hurley's crisp translation serves the urgency of the prose without sacrificing the colorful local idioms.

A writer with a world vision that transcended sex, politics and sexual politics, Reinaldo Arenas produced in his lifetime a major body of work. With his mythic, hysteric style, eye for satire and ear for language, Arenas was a writer who, even in death, is as vital as anyone writing today about Latin America. The Color of Summer will be read for years to come, reminding us of the great loss to literature that was Arenas death from AIDS at age 47.

Priority by Iselin C. Hermann. translated by G. Forester (Grove Press, $22)

Danish author Iselin Hermann's sensitive, epistolary novel is a cautionary tale about the differences between love and romance, fantasy and obsession. It's also a moody, atmospheric look into what can happen when you go head over heels without meeting face to face.

After visiting an art gallery, a woman writes a note to the artist expressing her admiration for his work. He writes back. Over several months, sympathies are shared, hopes and dreams revealed. Rarely have two people been so well suited, it seems. Romance blooms. As their exchanges heat up, the woman plans to visit the artist in his studio. When she does, surprises are in store.

Priority is a fascinating meditation on the lures and dangers love at a distance. This slender, impressionistic novel in letters delivers a kick-in-the-pants ending pay off that readers will remember.

Philip Herter writes frequently about international literature.

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