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A review by jilianh
The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
3.0
This book was... Vulgar. Vile. Genuinely difficult to read at times for me because it is so brutal in both the language and the storylines. I can't really say that I enjoyed it? It was definitely memorable though. Bleak, but memorable.
The writing style is quite fragmented with numerous different character perspectives and a ton of time jumping. I understand that this was very intentional and fitting to the cathedral building motif and the harshness of the environment/plot, but there were many times that I felt it was taking away from the reading experience instead of adding to it. The timelines are difficult to keep straight and a lot of plot points were left loose or unresolved, leaving me feeling only partially invested and not satisfied either. I didn't care for Gringo's storyline at all, so once that concluded I enjoyed it more but that is a huge portion of the book.
I feel like I can appreciate the book from an objective literary perspective for the style and story, but on a personal level it was overall not my cup of tea.
This was a really powerful and impactful conclusion though, which I must commend.
The writing style is quite fragmented with numerous different character perspectives and a ton of time jumping. I understand that this was very intentional and fitting to the cathedral building motif and the harshness of the environment/plot, but there were many times that I felt it was taking away from the reading experience instead of adding to it. The timelines are difficult to keep straight and a lot of plot points were left loose or unresolved, leaving me feeling only partially invested and not satisfied either. I didn't care for Gringo's storyline at all, so once that concluded I enjoyed it more but that is a huge portion of the book.
I feel like I can appreciate the book from an objective literary perspective for the style and story, but on a personal level it was overall not my cup of tea.
This was a really powerful and impactful conclusion though, which I must commend.
"Then time will pass, I will die, and with me everyone who lived in this time, but the photos will remain. Then the photos will die, along with anyone who can decipher a human face; later on, the heat will rise, and all of Cuba will end up underwater, and with
Cuba, the cathedral; but later, when everything dries up and nothing remains, and the extraterrestrial voyagers find it, how will they know that this cathedral was never finished? They will think that it was once
the main temple of a city of happy beings and that the
parishioners' children once ran down its aisles, and over the course of time, will it matter that it wasn't like that?"