An enthralling work of imagination and grit, Gala’s novel captures the complexity of one neighborhoodĪs much as it exemplifies the many pleasures of great fiction. This is certainly the case in Cuban author Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral, a darkly comic novel that buzzes around the Stewart family’s fated arrival to Cienfuegos. The temple, meanwhile, is never finished it grows and grows and grows, eating up money and time and the spirits of those dedicated to erecting it. The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2020) Reviewed by Megan Foster A good man is hard to find, as they say. One of Gringo’s victims haunts Prince’s friend Berta from beyond the grave, seeking help to take care of some unfinished business, which leads Berta to Araceli, with whom Berta and Prince form a love triangle. David King and Samuel Prince, the Stuart sons, have opposing personalities (King is athletic and domineering Prince is gentle and poetically minded), but they come together to commit a horrible atrocity. Arturo, the father, decides to build a temple for his growing church, the Church of the Holy Sacrament of the Resurrected, which begins as a congregation of “no more than a dozen people” and balloons to “more than twenty thousand.” Johannes, the artist daughter, beguiles and rejects the duplicitous hustler Gringo, who, because of this (according to him), turns into a murderous con man who sells the bodies of his victims as meat to unsuspecting locals in a neighboring upscale community. The Stuarts, a religious family, move into town and set into motion numerous threads, narrated by a number of neighborhood residents. In Gala’s strange, exuberant, and altogether brilliant English-language debut, a vibrant collection of narrators tell the story of a tight-knit community in Cienfuegos, Cuba.
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