Dominican Republic / All works
Novel
In the Time of the Butterflies
Julia Alvarez · 1994
Synopsis
Under the Trujillo dictatorship, four sisters grow up in a Catholic, conservative and devout family. Three of them, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, known as Mate, gradually join the clandestine resistance, where they are called the butterflies, after Minerva's code name. Each tells her story in turn, from childhood in the forties, Mate through the pages of her diary; Dedé, the fourth, who keeps out of the struggle, frames the narrative. The arrest of their husbands, then their own imprisonment, expose them ever more to the regime.
Context
The book appeared in 1994 from Algonquin Books, in Chapel Hill, three years after its author's first novel. It draws a fiction from the story of the Mirabal sisters, known in their country as “las mariposas”, after their code names in the underground, and has each of them speak in the first person. Publishers Weekly praised the way it conveys the atmosphere of a police state, where atrocities cannot be spoken. Daniel Lemoine translated it for Métailié in 1997.
Who it is for
In English, translated into French; a novel with several voices, easy to read, which is best read with a few reference points on the Trujillo regime.
Prizes and reception
Praised by Publishers Weekly on publication, then translated into Spanish and, by Métailié, into French.
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