My husband saw a documentary on Julia Alvarez and this book on PBS. He told me about it, and I checked it out of the library.
It was exquisite. I don't know why I had not heard of it before. I highly recommend it as a record of the Trujillo regime of over 30 years in the Dominican Republic. I cannot go into the oppression there and the cult of personality and his power over the everyday lives of the people, even to them being expected to have his portrait in their homes. He seduced their daughters and killed any who oppose them.
The novel is a fictionalization of the Mirabal sister: Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Patria. They, along with their husbands, were imprisoned for several months and later ambushed for their work in the underground to overthrow Trujillo. Their husbands, interestingly, were not killed. The sisters had been anti-Trujillo since their youth and died in the 30s/40s. Another sister, Dede (Adele) was not involved as much in the subversion and not there at the ambush, which occurred with the sisters were returning from visiting their husbands in prison. They were under constant surveillance and harassment, and under house arrest after their prison sentence. The three martyrs were great heroes in the country for many decades (the died in 1960. The book is told from all of their points of view, giving each distinct personalities, with Minerva the strongest and most radical in politics, although any opposition to Trujillo was considered radical and a crime.
The title comes from the nickname given to the sisters over the years of their "rebellion,"--las mariposas, the butterflies.*
Julia Alvarez has a wonderful postscript where she says something that grasped my soul: "For I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart."
This quote makes me want to write. She has said it better than I ever could. She and her family themselves escaped Trujillo in 1960, the same year as the Mirabal assassination.
The powerful book did make me think....
Could Trump be a Trujillo?
No. I don't believe he is that evil, just a narcissist, and the American people have a history of real republican democracy that the Dominicanos did not. Analogies of Trump to Hitler are really ridiculous; that does not mean his actions are not appalling. His greatest damage is as a chaos agent.
I recommend En El Tiempo de Las Mariposas (Spanish title). In a day when Colleen Hoover is a best seller, we really need something of substance like this novel.
*Just saying, "mariposa" is a beautiful word for butterflies. My granddaughter is in love with butterflies and wants me to show her a video of them on YouTube whenever I watch her. Since she is Mexican by heritage, I think I will teach her that word. I also prefer "flutterbies" to "butterflies," a name I don't understand.
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