The Palace of the White Skunks is a stylistically rich experimental novel that tells of the desolation, despair, and vicissitudes of a Cuban family prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The novel, which deliberately and systematically undermines the conventions of the realistic novel tradition, is centered on Fortunato, a sensitive and restless young man living through a turbulent political period in Cuban history: the insurrectional struggle against the dictatorial government of Fulgencio Batista. Desperate to escape the disappointments and cruelties of his family (whom he refers to as “creatures” and “wild beasts”), as well as to escape from Holguín, a small, conservative rural town, Fortunato attempts to join Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces. This flight for freedom, however, ends tragically when the young man is arrested, tortured, and executed by the government police.

The novel is divided into three parts: “Prologue and Epilogue,” “The Creatures Utter Their Complaints,” and “The Play.” In the fourteen pages that make up part 1, “Prologue and Epilogue,” the reader is introduced to the self-pitying and squabbling voices of each character, all members of the same family. At this point, the crisscrossing of voices is so entangled that it is extremely difficult to decipher during a first reading. These fragments of voices, however, will be contextualized and expanded during the second and third parts of the novel. With the (con)fusion of what is traditionally the first word (prologue) and last word (epilogue) of the traditional novel, the suggestion is made that there is no first or final word on any given matter; rather, discourse is open-ended, without a finalizing period.

Part 2, “The Creatures Utter Their Complaints,” constitutes the major portion of the novel. This section is divided into five “agonies” in which each family member takes turns articulating his or her own intimate sufferings. These accounts are presented as a rambling of voices that often conceals the identity of the speaking subject. Temporal-spatial realities are filtered through the turbulent voices of the family members, who do not concern themselves with providing objective reference points. It appears as if the same state of instability and crisis that is assaulting the country exists internally in each family member.

Part 2 also introduces fragments from newspaper accounts, bulletins of guerrilla activity, advertisements, film announcements, and beauty magazines; these fragments are juxtaposed alongside and serve to parallel the babel of voices of the family members. In “Fifth Agony,” there appear twelve versions of the two most significant episodes within the novel: Fortunato’s decision to escape from home to join the Castro-led rebels, and Adolfina’s unsuccessful attempt to lose her virginity during a night on the town. The contradictions in the different versions of these two fruitless quests reveal the difficulty of attempting to record any reality faithfully. Yet this lack of precision is quite irrelevant to the emotional intensity, dreams, and desires of both characters. In the end, any reader searching for objectivity in The Palace of the White Skunks will be at a loss and will consequently miss the artistic and creative intensity of the novel. To appreciate this text, one must surrender to its hallucinatory situations, implausible incidents, and disjointed digressions.

In part 3, “The Play,” the reader discovers the insertion of a play within the novel. This change of genre (from novel to drama) is accompanied by a significant change from interior monologue to dramatic dialogue. In this phantasmagoric theatrical representation, the family members become performers who reenact their own lives and obsessions. Immediately following the play, there appears “Sixth Agony,” which recounts yet another version of Fortunato’s escape. The omniscient narrator of this last agony describes the young man’s torture and death at the hands of government soldiers. Earlier, however, this same omniscient narrator, traditionally a reliable voice, had expressed doubt over whether Fortunato had ever joined the rebel forces. Regardless of what indeed happened, it is significant that no version denies Fortunato’s basic reasons for wanting to escape from home: hunger, poverty, repression, lack of opportunities, and the suffocating demands of his family.