The Color of Summer, Arenas's finest comic achievement, is also the fulfillment of his life's work, the Pentagonia, a five-volume cycle of autobiographical novels he began writing in his early twenties. Although it is the penultimate installment in his "secret history of Cuba," it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. A tale of survival by wits and wit, The Color of Summer is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.