Call Me Cassandra: A Novel

by Marcial Gala, Anna Kushner (Translator)

Overview

"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

From the author of the award-winning The Black Cathedral, a darkly magical tale of a haunted young dreamer, born in the wrong body and time, who believes himself to be a doomed prophetess from ancient Greek mythology.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250863003
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	821,619
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Marcial Gala is a novelist, a poet, and an architect from Cuba. He won the Pinos Nuevos Prize for best short story in 1999. His novel The Black Cathedral received the Premio de la Crítica Literaria and the Alejo Carpentier Award in 2012 and was published in English by FSG in 2020. Gala also won the 2018 Ñ Prize of the City of Buenos Aires-Clarín for Call Me Cassandra. He lives in Buenos Aires and Cienfuegos.

Anna Kushner, the daughter of Cuban exiles, was born in Philadelphia and has been traveling to Cuba since 1999. In addition to The Black Cathedral and Call Me Cassandra, she has translated the novels of Norberto Fuentes, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and Gonçalo M. Tavares, as well as two collections of nonfiction by Mario Vargas Llosa.

Editorial Reviews

"Dazzling . . . Deftly pushing the boundaries of both realism and first-person perspective, Gala (The Black Cathedral) makes it impossible for the reader to determine if Raúl/Cassandra is actually supernatural . . . Gala constructs sentences and scenes that swing easily from the mythological to the mundane, and Anna Kushner's translation does a wonderful job of capturing his tones--and his temporal shifts." --Marcela Valdes, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"A fitting tribute to the tenacious and brilliant gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), Call Me Cassandra repurposes an age-old myth to meld together a bitter war tale, a trans coming-of-age story, and a drama of a family splitting at the seams . . . In Call Me Cassandra, Gala dismantles the binaries that suffocate the region while confirming his standing as one of the most inventive new voices in contemporary Latin American fiction." --Derick Gomez, PopMatters

"An exploration of literary and personal fluidity, Call Me Cassandra riffs on Greek tragedy with warmth and poise . . . Gala flits between national, global, existential and personal concerns with ease . . . The personal and social dynamics of the city of Cienfuegos are on display through pin-sharp dialogue and characterization, beautifully rendered in Anna Kushner's translation." --Elisabeth Cook, BookBrowse

"The distinctive beauty of Call Me Cassandra is that its nonlinear narrative echoes the narrator's own fractured experience of time . . . In Anna Kushner's superb translation . . . the book takes on the cathartic power of traditional tragedies." --Marina Manoukian, ArtsFuse

"Mesmerizing . . . [Gala's] lively lyricism and steady realism provide sharp insights into Cuba's crumbling dreams of utopia . . . An intimate and sensory look into a real place . . . I look forward to reading more of [Gala's] evocative and beautifully written work." --Maya C. James, Locus

"Strange, dazzling . . . Kushner preserves Gala's lyricism and playfulness . . . Call Me Cassandra is both a thought-provoking meditation on myths and its own venture into mythmaking. Just as Rauli will 'die here in Africa, on the border with the Old World, ' Call Me Cassandra also sits on the edge of the Old World and New." --Mara Sandroff, New City

"Gala is an inventive, enticing storyteller, moving fluidly between past and present--and beyond--effortlessly traversing Greek temples and palaces, Cienfuegos's nightclubs and Angolan battlefields to deliver a brilliantly subversive coming-of-age triumph . . . [Call Me Cassandra is] a fascinating examination of fluid identity set against cultural expectations." --Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

"Fate hangs over this novel . . . A haunting meditation on identity and violence." --Kirkus (starred review)

"The appearance of mythical beings during opportune times, Raúl's pitiless predictions, and the unfolding events of a fraught time in Cuban history contribute to the power of Gala's creative spin on an indelible myth and imaginative, memorable, and heartbreaking tale of identity and fatalism." --Andrienne Cruz, Booklist (starred review)

"Lyrical and elegiac . . . Gala's prose, elegantly translated by Kushner, perfectly conveys the protagonist's dual realities . . . In the end, the author offers a singular invocation of immortality." --Publishers Weekly

"A spellbinding novel by one of the best writers of the Americas. Call Me Cassandra is Marcial Gala's masterpiece, blending Greek myth with the Cuban intervention in Angola. At the heart of this incandescent tales burns sensitive Rauli, caught between the Gods and the Revolution, between a body that he longs to escape and a world that lets no one like him escape. Call Me Cassandra is Chronicle of a Death Foretold but blacker and brilliantly better." --Junot Díaz, author of This is How You Lose Her

"I admire greatly the nimbleness of Marcial Gala's prose, the way his sentences swing effortlessly from emotional ruin to beauty to gallows hilarity and back again. As the storyline cuts between Rauli's childhood in Cienfuegos and his life as a soldier in Angola, a portrait of an unforgettable and defiant spirit emerges. Call Me Cassandra is a searching and uncompromising story about the vast complexities of displacement, the breathtaking power of the imagination, and the tidal pull of fate. I love this novel." --Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf By the Ears

"Rich, haunting, dark and superbly alluring, Call Me Cassandra is a vivid, intoxicating novel that takes us into the dreamy daily life of a trans girl in the barracks of the Cuban army in Angola. Marcial Gala is one of the most brilliant storytellers working in the Americas today, and this is the kind of book of hope, sex, and the power of imagination that makes you want to join a revolution." --Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona

"It has been many years since I read a novel that excited me so much and so deeply. Marcial Gala surprises in the dexterity, audacity and elegance with which he articulates a very original fictional mechanism, creating a narrator who remembers the future as much as the past--but is condemned to have no one believe his predictions. Call Me Cassandra takes a brave and sensitive look at Cuba's participation in the Angolan civil war. If there are books that restore our faith in literature, and literature's ability to make the other known to us, this is one of them." --José Eduardo Agualusa, author of The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

From the Publisher

11/01/2021

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2021

Author of the international award winner The Black Cathedral, published in the United States in 2020, Cuban novelist/poet Gala investigates the failures of Cuba's revolution through visionary ten-year-old Rauli. Rauli doesn't fit in at home or at school, perhaps with good reason. He knows that he was born in the wrong body, that he will die at age 18 as a soldier in Angola, and that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess and doomed seer Cassandra.

Library Journal

★ 2021-10-27
A figure from Greek mythology is reborn in the Caribbean in this novel by the award-winning author of The Black Cathedral(2020).

In 1975, Cuba sent troops to support the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola in that country’s civil war. Over the next decade and a half, more than 300,000 Cubans would participate in this proxy war between Soviet-style communism and Western powers led by the United States. This is the historical backdrop for Gala’s tale of a boy from the port city of Cienfuegos who believes that he is the reincarnation of Cassandra, the priestess of Apollo “forever condemned to know the future and never be believed.” Rauli’s sense that he is in the wrong time and place is exacerbated by the fact that he is a slight, fair, bookish boy who likes to wear dresses in a culture that prizes machismo. His difference will make him a target—for other kids, for his fellow soldiers, for the captain who brutally abuses him—but it also gives meaning to a life that he knows will be short. Because he has Cassandra’s curse, he knows that he will die in Angola at 19. Before he dies, though, he will converse with Greek gods and African orishas and be accompanied by a chorus of Erinyes that gives his story the shape of classical tragedy. Fate hangs over this novel. Rauli cannot escape his doom any more than the nymph Thetis can protect her son, Achilles, by dressing him as a girl. Of course, the clothes that are meant to disguise Achilles’ true nature reveal Rauli’s, but it’s a truth that he is compelled to keep hidden. The Cuban conscript is not a great warrior, and his grave will be an unmarked patch of jungle, but—unlike the hero of the Iliad—Rauli has the power to give voice to his own story.

A haunting meditation on identity and violence.

Kirkus Reviews