The Black Cathedral

Starred review from November 18, 2019
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. The Stuarts, a religious family, move into town and set into motion numerous threads, narrated by a number of neighborhood residents. 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. 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. 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. 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. An enthralling work of imagination and grit, Gala’s novel captures the complexity of one neighborhood
as much as it exemplifies the many pleasures of great fiction.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
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 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. Their father, a religious zealot, is obsessed with building a cathedral. 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...the celestial Jerusalem." Events don't unfold that way, to say the least. 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. Though some move abroad, all find themselves affected by the violence and desperation of Punta Gotica and by its strange, unfinished building. 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. The two sons eventually commit a terrible crime together (though worse crimes have already been done by an African Cuban character nicknamed Gringo). A retired principal of the Cienfuegos school laments of his former pupils, "They practically all turned out bad. Even the good ones aren't like we expected. 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." A raucous, anguished, fast-paced story, tautly written and deeply rooted.

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November 15, 2019
For anyone who has nurtured the fantasy of Cuba as a tropical socialist paradise, that illusion is heartbreakingly shattered in this award-winning novel by architect and writer Gala, the first of his works to be translated into English. Kushner's nimble translation flows with flavor and intensity while telling a dark present-day story. A multitude of voices from a marginalized community of mostly Black people in the coastal city of Cienfuegos testifies to the series of events that is unleashed when the strange Stuart family, including the preacher Arturo, arrives to build a "black" cathedral. Narrated by residents alive, dead, and on death row, the provocative story eventually involves cannibalism, corruption, and murder, unfolding in three parts and roaming from this pocket of the island to Barcelona and points in the U.S. Gala's raw, compelling, and highly readable novel lays bare a Cuba that, just like everywhere else, has not found an answer to human desperation, envy, or evil. For most literary fiction collections, especially those serving readers interested in contemporary Latin American fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)