The Assault: A Novel

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, Kafkaesque picture of a dehumanised 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 winnows out whisperers, sexual deviants, and dissidents of every sort - until memory has been banished and spoken language has been nearly forgotten.The Assault> crowns the work of one of the most visionary writers to have emerged from Castro’s Cuba, a writer from Octavio Paz.