El mundo alucinante

Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a mischievous and adventurous monk who lived between the 18th and 19th centuries, and was persecuted for his religious heterodoxy, is turned into a character and protagonist of this novel. In his tireless wanderings -he was exiled, was imprisoned countless times and even, once dead, his body was moved from one place to another-, he toured the Spain of Carlos IV and Godoy, the France of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. , Lady Hamilton's England, Italy, the United States ("a country where a tax must be paid for each breath", comments Fray Servando) and Cuba. Not in vain, transcending the simple biography and doing a literary pirouette that is part of the Cuban baroque tradition and that covers several genres, Reinaldo Arenas weaves an authentic adventure novel, as he himself subtitles it, until giving it a fabulous, fantastic dimension, almost mythical.