Order may come in multiple shipments, however you will only be charged a flat fee.Ģ-10 days after all items have arrived in the warehouse Items in order will be sent as soon as they arrive in the warehouse. Lyrical and gritty, heartbreaking and luminous, Rauli’s is the story of the inexorable pull of destiny. Burdened with knowledge of tragedies yet to come, Rauli nonetheless strives to know himself. 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. And third, that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess Cassandra. Second, that he will die, aged eighteen, as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. 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. He loves to read, especially Greek myths, but in Cuba in the 1970s, novels and gods can be dangerous. 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. (Jan.Ten-year-old Rauli lives in a world that is often hostile. In the end, the author offers a singular invocation of immortality. 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). It’s a fascinating premise, but not a whole lot happens. 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.

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.

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. He’s more comfortable in the company of his mother and his father’s Russian mistress, Svetlana. 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. 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.

Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala