The Assault

A profane narrative filled with righteous rage and dark humor targets philosophical discussion, homosexuality, and the forgetting of the words to heroic anthems as comparable crimes in a surreal journey that features a cockroach-hunting holiday.

Set after the "last big war" in a society of "degenerate beasts"--where human beings have snouts and claws and the criminals sport polished shaved heads--this is the final novel in the late Cuban-born Arenas's "Pentagonia" quintet ( Singing from the Well ; The Palace of the White Skunks , etc. ), a fictional exploration of Castro-era Cuba. Narrated by an agent for the "Bureau of Counterwhispering," the novel details the agent's mission to find and execute whisperers against the "Glorious Nation" and its "Represident." It's a country where "no one has a name, and all orientations help to make sure that one stranger is exactly like every other stranger, so that no one can remember anybody in particular, and therefore no one can be remembered." His motivation, however, is more personal than political: a desire to find and kill his mother because he is "coming to look more like her every day"--and herein lies the key to Arenas's parable. But this brief and original novel is burdened with much repetition; the thin plot is hindered by the excessive partitioning of the narrative into short chapters. More satire than allegory, the book is also hurt by an abrupt ending. But Arenas does draw a disturbing portrait of the political extremes and superfluous nationalism of a society headed toward a point where "every person will find joy in betraying every other person, eating every other person, and for that they will even patiently wait their turn."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Arenas, sick with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990, but his ``Pentagonia'' sequence (which includes Farewell to the Sea, 1985; Singing from the Well, 1987; and The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990) had been already capped by this dystopian, utterly disgusted little fantasy about life in Castro's dictatorial never-never land. It's a world of Multi-Families, Bureaus of Counterwhispering, Servo-Perimeters, and ever-remindful maxims from the illustrious ``Represident,'' such as ``Memory is diversionist, and must be dealt with harshly.'' People go about their shrunken lives like vermin, with no greater margin of freedom. They breed when instructed to, look only where it is permitted to look, and speak hardly at all. The book's narrator--a high functionary of the regime--moves through this joyless and instinctive existence, sampling its cruelties and repressions as he searches for the repulsive woman who is his mother, whom he has vowed to kill. Arenas has some dark and profound points to make (or remake: a number were already Orwell's or Zinoviev's) about the danger of language to authority, about revolution's insistence on the utility of psychosis (``What we had to do--and this the Represident knows well--was undermine everything, destroy everything that represented balance, that offered a point of comparison, that symbolized stability, that stood in our memories--demolish everything that might have represented the center, coherence, order, a system of values...''). But his matricidal narrator serves both as a monster from within and as a somewhat ironic sexual obsessive; and this blurred focus lends the book (as is the case with so much of Arenas) an hysterical overtone, a whiff of something above and beyond the stench of what it satirizes and full-heartedly hates. Chill but distracted, scattershot. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is the final volume of what the author called his agony in five parts, or pentagony, which begins with Singing in the Well (LJ 7/87). Boatlifted from Cuba in 1980, Arenas settled in New York, where he felt frustrated by America's diehard Castro supporters, contracted AIDS, and committed suicide. Here he takes deadly aim at Cuba's glorious "represident," in whose service the narrator rounds up dissidents and deviants to be juiced for patriotic irrigation. People are nameless insects who aspire to "disacquaintance" with their neighbors. The narrator is obsessed by his mother, whom he must annihilate before he assumes her shape, and in the climactic scene he nukes her in a smoky blast of shrapnel and unspeakable substances. Not for traditional readers, this book will delight fans of 1984, Kafka, and magic realism as well as Castro countdowners.
--Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.