Synopsis
The second novel in the quintet that began with the internatinally acclaimed Singing from the Well, Reinaldo Arena's The palace of the white stunks 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 the pauses in his family's quarrels, the crackle of rebel gunfire- a soun that will beckon him into a world as demented as the one he has sworn to escape.