Its narrators, more than a dozen in number, are usually granted a page at a time before other characters butt in, pick up the thread or offer their own spin on the same series of events. Even as the novel charts the voyages of its vagabonds, it represents an attempt to draw the periphery into the center, steering us toward the provinces as it renovates the Cuban novel. 'Accidental cannibals, tenderhearted killers, angst-ridden ghosts and well-behaved artists soon populate topsy-turvy universe.

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. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.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 Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fate.

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala