The appearance of mythical beings during opportune times, Raúl’s pitiless predictions, and the unfolding events of a fraught time in Cuban history contribute to the power of Gala’s creative spin on an indelible myth and imaginative, memorable, and heartbreaking tale of identity and fatalism.«Īdrienne Cruz, Booklist (starred review) ✺ spellbinding novel by one of the best writers of the Americas. Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ✺s in The Black Cathedral, Cuban writer Gala sets his newest work of magical realism in his hometown of Cienfuegos. Publishers Weekly ✺ haunting meditation on identity and violence.« In the end, the author offers a singular invocation of immortality.« Gala’s prose, elegantly translated by Kushner, perfectly conveys the protagonist’s dual realities (“We are but shadows set on the canvas of this life, my Zeus,” he thinks, while on the battlefield). Marcela Valdes, The New York Times Book Review »Lyrical and elegiac. The story slaloms through past, present and future, braiding together moments from Raúl’s childhood in Cuba and his military service in Angola.« Gala constructs sentences and scenes that swing easily from the mythological to the mundane, and Anna Kushner’s translation does a wonderful job of capturing his tones - and his temporal shifts.
Deftly pushing the boundaries of both realism and first-person perspective. It is an abundant picture, both fatalistic and magical, in which an exuberant language unfolds.«Ĭorriere della Sera ✺ novel in which the power of imagination is able to break through the bars of the view of others, and create a voice with the power to tell its own story.« It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.✼uban-born Marcial Gala’s second novel is set in both the Caribbean and Africa, on earth and in the sky, virtuously blending the different spaces.
Told by a chorus of narrators-including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer-who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another's stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a darkly comic indictment of modern Cuba, gritty and realistic but laced with magic. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fate The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba.
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