The Feast of the Goat was the last book picked by my RL book club and I’m so grateful that they chose it, otherwise I mightn’t have read this fantastic book about the Trujillo era. The book starts off by introducing us to Urania Cabal who has just returned to the Dominican Republic at the age of f...
When I saw him so absorbed in his reading, for he was reading as he walked, my curiosity was piqued. You know how much I love books. I could not have been more astonished. He can not be in his right mind. Do you know what he was enjoying so much? A book about Chinese tortures, with photographs of th...
I'd just started an Irvine Welsh novel when I remembered that I have a meeting of my RL book club at the end of the month *slaps head*. With that in mind I decided I should really get started on this as I'm not getting a lot of time to read at the minute, due to writing commitments. So far I'm rea...
Llosa takes the huge, horrible story of the reign of Trujillo and distills it into two intense events. One is very public, involving a large cast of characters: the day of Trujillo's assassination and its immediate aftermath. The other is intensely personal for one fictional woman and her family: ...
A really good and beautiful book. That is as beautiful as a book can be that is filled with murder, torture and rape. The sliding between different viewpoints and times is done expertly. The prose style which varies, but is written in machine gun bursts took me awhile to adjust to, but once I did...
This magnificent little book is page-turner. It is a plot driven work that analyzes the rule and the assassination (and the consequences thereof) of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The book has an unlikely hero (to reveal the name here would constitute a ‘spo...
I didn't exactly enjoy reading this book. I am not into enjoying reading about the suffering of others, the total subjugation of a nation, the corruption of their souls and the torture of their bodies. I learned many things from this book that I wasn't aware of, some history of the Dominican Republi...
I read the novel because I wanted to read something that explored the mind of the despot, partly because despots (Mubarak, Ghaddafi, Kim Jong-il, Saleh etc) and despotic laws and actions (like indefinite detention, protest crackdowns etc) were all the rage last year. I started Marquez’s Autumn of th...
4.5 starsThis book has made me want to learn more from my parents about what it meant to be born and live through the Trujillo era. What it meant to my family and what was really going on during that time. I have heard some stories from my father, but now the context of understanding has broadened...
I find the expression “benevolent dictator” quite acerbic; paradoxical in fact. The exclusive benefactor of populous land; a leader who promises to the countrymen a utopia (Thomas Moore’s unicorn), stands on the world pedestal portraying duplicitous cultural patriotism while butchering every free vo...
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