The Assault (Pentagonia)

Reinaldo Arenas (author) Andrew Hurley (translator) Thomas Olchie (introduction)
Publisher: Penguin Books
June 1 1995
EAN: 9780140157185
ISBN: 0140157182

Brief Description:
Originally published: New York: Viking Penguin, 1994.

Marc Notes:
A novel--Cover.; Originally published: New York: Viking Penguin, 1994.; A surrealistic novel on a dictatorship, a Cuban version of George Orwell's 1984. The protagonist is a counter-whispering agent whose task is to ferret out people spreading rumors inimical to the regime.

Biographical Note:
Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas settled in New York where he lived until his death from AIDS ten years later.
Andrew Hurley is a translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir. He is professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico.

Thomas Colchie is an acclaimed translator, editor, and literary agent for international authors. He is the editor of A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes. He has written for the Village Voice and The Washington Post. His translations include Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman and (with Elizabeth Bishop, Gregory Rabassa, and Mark Strand) Carlos Drummond de Andrade's Travelling in the Family.

Publisher Marketing:
The author of the brilliant and highly acclaimed memoir, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas concluded his sequence of five novels - at once a "secret history of Cuba" and a writer's autobiography - with an allegorical satire. In The Assault, he paints a harrowing, yet at times boldly entertaining, Kafkaesque picture of a dehumanized people and the despair of an observer/narrator himself clinging to sanity. This profane narrative, filled with righteous rage, takes us on a surreal journey through a blackly humorous shadowland where philosophical discussion, homosexuality, and forgetting the words to heroic anthems are comparable crimes - and a cockroach hunt makes a national holiday. With echoes of Rabelais, Swift, Orwell, and the films of Lois Bunuel, The Assault crowns the work of one of the most visionary writers to have emerged from Castro's Cuba, a writer whom Octavio Paz called "remarkable... as much for his intellectual dignity as for his talent."

Publisher Marketing:
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.