The Palace of the White Skunks: A Novel

The second novel in the quintet that began with the internationally acclaimed Singing from the Well, Reinaldo Arenas's The Palace of the White Skunks is a brilliant, hallucinatory, and erotically charged portrait of Cuba on the eve of its 1959 revolution. It is the story of Fortunato, a dreamy, sullen boy trapped in a house full of abandoned aunts in a decrepit backwater. Tormented by sexual desires for both men and women, he hears, in his family's quarrels, the crackle of rebel gunfire--a sound that will beckon him into a world as demented as the one he has sworn to escape. Like an inspired collaboration between Marcel Proust and the magic realists, The Palace of the White Skunks is a masterpiece encompassing all the squalor, spectacle, and tragedy of Cuba under two dictators.… (more)