When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.

I would call them the Black Cathedral generation.' Trying to make sense of the Stuart boys' crime, one character says, 'They were children, wicked children like all of us, children without a childhood.'Ī raucous, anguished, fast-paced story, tautly written and deeply rooted.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Even the good ones aren't like we expected. A retired principal of the Cienfuegos school laments of his former pupils, 'They practically all turned out bad. The two sons eventually commit a terrible crime together (though worse crimes have already been done by an African Cuban character nicknamed Gringo). As Arturo Stuart labors over 'the first cathedral that is truly for and by the meek,' one of his sons is initiated into the Cuban religion Palo, and the other finds work at a Russian mobster's brothel. Though some move abroad, all find themselves affected by the violence and desperation of Punta Gotica and by its strange, unfinished building. Later the architect comes to believe 'that it was called the Black Cathedral for those with darkness in their hearts.' Told by a shifting, overlapping multitude of voices, the novel explores the interconnected lives of the local characters: kids, petty criminals, politicians, artists and writers, ghosts of people murdered by a serial killer, and the killer as well, speaking from death row. the celestial Jerusalem.' Events don't unfold that way, to say the least. The architect hired to design it dreams of the city of the future, viewed from the back of an angel: 'I saw the Cienfuegos of the future, a beautiful city, full of elegant buildings. Their father, a religious zealot, is obsessed with building a cathedral. The Stuart family's arrival in a rough part of Cienfuegos, Cuba, sparks the neighbors' interest: 'If you're born black, you're already screwed imagine if, in addition, you have to live in the squalid rooming houses of a neighborhood like this.' Graffiti here in Punta Gotica reads 'NO ONE GETS OUT OF THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ALIVE.' The two Stuart sons are smart but odd, the beautiful daughter artistic. Award-winning Cuban writer and architect Gala links the fate of a community with the doomed construction of a cathedral in this dark, violent, often comic novel, his first to be translated into English.

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala