The assault

Description

In this, the final volume in the series of five novels that constitute his "secret history of Cuba", Reinaldo Arenas paints a harrowing, and at times boldly entertaining, Kafka-esque picture of a dehumanized people living in a world where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death and a cockroach hunt makes for a national holiday. Narrated by a hate-filled government torturer who has become an agent for the "Bureau of Counterwhispering"," The Assault follows his travels through a blackly humorous shadowland as he winnow out whisperers, sexual deviants, and dissidents of every sort--until memory has been banished and spoken language has been nearly forgotten.

Description

The author of the brilliant and highly acclaimed memoir, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas concluded his sequence of five novels - at once a "secret history of Cuba" and a writer's autobiography - with an allegorical satire. In The Assault, he paints a harrowing, yet at times boldly entertaining, Kafkaesque picture of a dehumanized people and the despair of an observer/narrator himself clinging to sanity. This profane narrative, filled with righteous rage, takes us on a surreal journey through a blackly humorous shadowland where philosophical discussion, homosexuality, and forgetting the words to heroic anthems are comparable crimes - and a cockroach hunt makes a national holiday. With echoes of Rabelais, Swift, Orwell, and the films of Lois Bunuel, The Assault crowns the work of one of the most visionary writers to have emerged from Castro's Cuba, a writer whom Octavio Paz called "remarkable... as much for his intellectual dignity as for his talent."

Subjects

Other Editions

• The assaultViking1994-01-01
• The AssaultPenguin (Non-Classics)1995-06-01
• The AssaultPaperbackPenguin (Non-Classics)1995-06-01