![]() ![]() Like Cassandra, Raúl sees, or thinks he sees, the future of every person around him, as well as visions of Greek and Santeria gods and spirits. When he’s in preschool, Raúl decides that he is the reincarnation of Cassandra, the Trojan princess desired and then cursed by Apollo, who gave her the power to see the future but decreed that her prophecies would never be believed. Set in Cuba and Angola during the 1970s and ’80s, the story is narrated by one Raúl Iriarte. This is the rich tradition that the Cuban writer Marcial Gala joins with his dazzling novel “Call Me Cassandra.” Some of the best stories on my bookshelf are written by authors who recognize both the beauty and the danger of the unreal, creating characters who are saved, or ruined, by their hunger for fantasy, whether it’s Don Quixote tilting at windmills on the plains of La Mancha Madame Bovary daydreaming of romance through dull Normandy afternoons or Walter Mitty dropping out of reality to become a combat hero, even as he sits in a Waterbury hotel awaiting the next order from his domineering wife. Fiction is an art, of course, but it also may be a painkiller and an addiction. Novelists deal in fantasy the way that pharmacologists do in narcotics. ![]() CALL ME CASSANDRA By Marcial Gala Translated by Anna Kushner ![]()
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