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.
A passionate, epic writer, the author of Before Night Falls, concludes his five-novel sequence--a "secret history of Cuba" and a writer's autobiography--with this allegorical satire. Arenas paints a harrowing yet boldly entertaining Kafka-esque picture of a dehumanized people and the despair of an observer/narrator clinging to sanity.
