FICTION

THE ASSAULT by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley (Viking: $20.95; 145 pp.) This is the fifth and last in a series of five novels that the author, who died in 1990, once called “a secret history of Cuba.” The last, “Before Night Falls,” was published in 1993. In “The Assault,” an allegorical satire, Arenas lets loose, drips venom and creates a future world that is also the present world, in which human beings do each other every wrong and insult and pain-inducing thing until they resemble the worn-out husks of human animals. It is like reading Kafka, Borges, Huxley, Orwell and, if you’re feeling good and can laugh now and then, a little Calvino. The thread running through each gruesome chapter is the narrator’s desire to kill, maim, spindle and mutilate his mother, lest he become like her. As a bureaucrat on a tour of the Servo-Perimeter Satellite Cities for the government and the Represident, he searches for her and almost gets her several times. “And still I have not managed to kill her. I go outside again. It’s a starry night, as they used to say, way back in the past. . . . I watch officers from the Post-Mortuary Prison carry away the bodies of people snagged during the not-night on the hooks on the not-benches in the not-park.” The hooks are to grab and kill those indulging in idleness. The not-night was the idea of the Represident, who abolished night because it could not possibly exist in a perfect society. This cruel world is replete with the Bureau of Counterwhispering, the Claw of Power, Breeding Permits and the Multi-Family. Arenas allows himself only a few vomit-and-violence-free passages, particularly toward the end, where he spells out the reigning principles of this society: “Do you believe that a person who can choose, a person who is free, can bear to see other people who cannot choose, who are not free? 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.” It’s one of those books that makes you reel, and you want to lie face down somewhere to sleep it off.