Call Me Cassandra
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction
“Dazzling." —Marcela Valdes, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"A spellbinding novel by one of the best writers of the Americas." —Junot Díaz, author of This is How You Lose Her
Ten-year-old Rauli lives in a world that is often hostile. His older brother is violent; his philandering father doesn’t understand him; his intelligence and sensitivity do not endear him to the other children at school. He loves to read, especially Greek myths, but in Cuba in the 1970s, novels and gods can be dangerous. Despite the signs that warn Rauli to repress and fear what he is, he knows three things to be true: First, that he was born in the wrong body. Second, that he will die, aged eighteen, as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. And third, that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess Cassandra.
Moving between Rauli’s childhood and adolescence, between the Angolan battlefield, the Cuban city of Cienfuegos, and the shores of ancient Troy, Marcial Gala’s Call Me Cassandra tells of the search for identity amid the collapse of Cuba’s utopian dreams. Burdened with knowledge of tragedies yet to come, Rauli nonetheless strives to know himself. Lyrical and gritty, heartbreaking and luminous, Rauli’s is the story of the inexorable pull of destiny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Cuban poet and novelist Gala's lyrical and elegiac return (after The Black Cathedral), a young man grows up feeling stifled by life in Castro's Cuba. At 10, Rauli Iriarte is effeminate and bookish, imperiled by the strict gender roles embodied by his violent brother, drunken father, and unsympathetic school board. He's more comfortable in the company of his mother and his father's Russian mistress, Svetlana. As it happens, Rauli is also Cassandra, the Greek prophetess of ancient myth, cursed with the knowledge that he will die as a young soldier in Angola, where he is dispatched as part of the Cuban Intervention. There, on "a continent full of ghosts, the ghosts of kings, dark ghosts of dark wizards," he is simultaneously swept up in the Trojan War and forced to relive The Iliad's cycle of death and carnage. Lodged irrevocably between genders, historical periods, and legends, Rauli—who'd rather be acknowledged as Cassandra—must find meaning and purpose in a life he knows to be tragically foreshortened. It's a fascinating premise, but not a whole lot happens. Still, Gala's prose, elegantly translated by Kushner, perfectly conveys the protagonist's dual realities ("We are but shadows set on the canvas of this life, my Zeus," he thinks, while on the battlefield). In the end, the author offers a singular invocation of immortality.
