The Black Cathedral, Marcial Gala
The Black Cathedral, Marcial Gala
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The Black Cathedral
A Novel

Author: Marcial Gala, Anna Kushner

Narrator: Kyla García, Gary Tiedemann

Unabridged: 6 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/03/2020


Synopsis

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.

About Marcial Gala

Marcial Gala was born in Havana in 1963. He is a novelist, a poet, and an architect and is a member of UNEAL, the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. He won the Pinos Nuevos Prize for best short story in 1999. The Black Cathedral received the Alejo Carpentier Award for best novel in 2012 and the Critics' Award in 2012. He lives in Buenos Aires and Cienfuegos.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Miesha on December 29, 2019

Black Cathedral is interesting. The setting is mostly the Cuban town of Cienfuegos which has its fractured divisions of middle class and poor, black, white and mulatto, the good side of the tracks and the bad, the creative class and the workers, foreign and native born. The characters are static; th......more

Goodreads review by Tundra on March 11, 2020

If you’ve read My Sister the Serial Killer I would describe this as the next level of horrific violence and definitely more black than humour. Through a community of individual narrators, giving eye witness testimonies, we circle around the Cuban neighbourhood of Cienfuegos delving into the dark act......more

Goodreads review by 2TReads on January 24, 2022

I enjoyed every minute spent with this book: fast-paced and told through and from the perspectives of characters that were central to and who observed the narrative during and after the fact. I could not look away. Gala uses his intimate knowledge of Cuba to render a character-centred story with loc......more

Goodreads review by Esther on June 21, 2020

This was cool! Def made a mistake pausing this book to read x4 Harry Potter bc this story is told through switching between many narrators (ghosts, serial killers, lesbians, architects) and I forgot who was who by the time I returned to it. But brutal and magical and punk rock! Glad this book was fi......more

Goodreads review by Kim on February 10, 2020

Really good. Engaging characters, and a style of time/voice shifts which ensures that the reader never gets bored.......more