The Black Cathedral

A Novel

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.

©2012 Marcial Gala (P)2020 Tantor

A dark humorous take on contemporary Cuba

Sounding like a kaleidoscope of gossipy voices, each with their take and stake in the events unfolding makes for an interest narrative style that the author manages to pull off. I was amused and entertained and even charmed by the characters. Surely the darkest sides of the story reveal a desperation that lives along side a banality that haunts many a life in this story of contemporary Cuba.