Gala's poetry has been translated into English yet. This novel wasn't available in English until 2020, and, as far as my searches have informed me, none of Mr.

As much as I love literary sex, this book made me want to don a chastity belt and a flannel apron.

This is a powerful work, and it terrified me. Authors who write with imagery and precision of the mystical and mundane worlds their protagonists occupy. Marcial Gala, a Cuban poet, landed himself, when he published this novel in 2012, into a group with some seriously good writers: Sandra Cisneros, Isabel Allende, Jacqueline Woodson, and Roddy Doyle. This is one of the darkest novels I've ever encountered, and the ONLY reason I finished it was the exceptional writing. My unique environs can't hold a candle to what the neighbors in Punta Gotica can claim: serial killers, necrophiliacs, rapists, voyeurs and cannibals.ĭoes it matter that much to know why we are so bad, so heartless and lacking in scruples? I've always chalked up my childhood neighborhood to being “colorful,” “diverse,” and, occasionally, “scary.”īut, now that I've read The Black Cathedral, I feel like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. We had two teenaged boys who tried, frequently, to get us girls to pull down our panties, and we had two teenaged boys who turned out to be notorious house burglars, wanted in three counties. I thought my neighborhood was quirky growing up: we had Southerners with shotguns, we had Jews with two terrifying Doberman Pinschers, we had a Caribbean woman who never, in my entire childhood, wore anything other than a muumuu. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away. 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.

The black cathedral by marcial gala