In The Time Of The Butterflies (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
I have completed the book. I am not as enthralled as when I began it. Why? What went wrong? I am only going to give the book three stars.I am not going to give another synopsis of the book. If that is what you are looking for please see the book description above. I have learned how it might have been to live in the Dominican Republic during the latter half of the 20th Century, mostly under Dictator Trujillo!s reign. The four Mirabel sisters fight against him have today reached mythic proportions. This book is fiction. Neither myth nor fiction give us the true facts. I would have preferred that the epilogue clearly stated what is known and what is imagined. The author wants to wipe out the mythic status of these women so that we readers can more easily relate to them as four individuals, four different women with different personality traits. Clearly one is portrayed as the rebel rouser, one is religious, one just hasn't the requisite courage and the fourth? Well, she is the youngest and this is evident all throughout the story. Does the author succeed? Do we readers empathize with them? Do we relate to one of the women more than another given our own specific personality traits? I did not empathize with any of them, although I did recognize their differences.Each chapter title indicates which sister is speaking and the dates when the events in the chapter take place. Thus each chapter should reflect the views of one of the four sisters. You are given her thoughts. You are meant to see the events through her eyes. Something went wrong with this presentation: I frequently had to flip back to check which of the girls was speaking or when the events were occurring.The bottom line is: I did NOT relate to the girls that well. I actually cringed when I had to get through the religious sister's chapters. Neither do I know if the author has portrayed their personalities correctly. This should have been made clear in the epilogue with detailed entries explaining why she chose to represent each as she has done.I did enjoy how the author expressed herself, particularly at the beginning of the book. I did enjoy the suspense of the denouement. I think it is admirable that the author wants us to relate to the sisters on a personal level. I believe she wants us to do this so that we too might be encouraged to take a stand against injustice, as they did! **********************This is good simply because the lines make me smile. What do you think of these: "The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it don't believe in the hammer." Or: the air was so fragrant that it "smelled like a rose garden wished it could smell." I want a writer to delight me with their ability to express themselves in an imaginative manner. I am on page 76; every couple of pages I hit sentences that I love.And I didn't know much about the dictator Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. I am learning. This is just my kind of historical fiction in other words!
I think I've decided not to re-read this, so I can't review it properly because I've forgotten my thoughts. I'm glad this was brought to my attention by the year of reading women selection because it's an amazing story and an important piece of radical history. As other reviewers note, by focussing on the personal and making the sisters distinct (even idiosyncratic) and flawed Alvarez demonstrates that extraordinary courage comes from people like you and I (Malala Yousefzai's book comes to mind here). Also, La Mariposas come across as awesome and heroic, but generally very feminine in the sense of a familiar traditional gender socialisation; nurturing, caring, with integrity stemming from avowed emotion, conscious of self-presentation, and aspiring to a passionate and stable family life, especially young Mate. I am inevitably projecting my own experiences onto Latin@ culture however.My favourite voice was Patria's, although I related more to Minerva in general. Her self-awareness was extraordinary, and her religious faith challenged my (generally negative) perceptions of Catholicism and faith generally. If I felt the girls/women were bourgeois and privileged, that's probably why Alvarez devotes a lot of time to conveying the texture of their experiences in prison and the relationships they built there. I appreciated Alvarez's focus on women; the many men in the story remain peripheral. The limited attention to race is my main disappointment in a generally satisfying read. Brief mentions of the Taino and Trujillo's white supremacy are included, and there is a little space for raising awareness in the jail, but we don't see much confrontation with racism in the extensive character development.For me what makes this so worthwhile and exciting is the depth and detail of characterisation. Sometimes I was really struck by the thoughts behind the thoughts, mostly of Patria, but also others, such as Mate's confession: 'I think I'm going to burst' in a context that causes this to position the soul as desire and desire as a kind of fullness, the opposite of the classic formulation. On the level of the personal, this story gives much food for thought.
What do You think about In The Time Of The Butterflies (1995)?
"In the Time of the Butterflies" was beautiful and sad. I loved every one of the sisters. Their sacrifice, during the Trujillo regime, made me question what I would be willing to sacrifice for freedom and it made me think about my sister. The image that made me cry and made me angry was of the sisters standing in the garden one night looking back at the lit house as their mama bustles around getting their children ready for bed. Alvarez says they look at the house with longing as if they were already dead and wishing to watch their children grow up. That decision between political upheaval and being with and living for their children haunted me. How could they sacrifice a life with their children? I know they were fighting against an oppressive, tyrannical regime and that they believed their fight for freedom was to create a better world for their children. I guess it bothers me because I admired the sisters but I wouldn't have made the same choice.I don't know how Dede survived losing three sisters. My sister is lovely, vivacious, and passionate and I don't think I would be able to stop screaming if she was taken from me. I wondered while I read if it haunted Dede that her sisters died in fear. They weren't shot by snipers. They watched their murderers strangle them. Like I said, a sad book, but a book I think teens in the U.S. should have to read to learn more about Latin American history and the U.S.'s role in the political insecurity in that region.
—Kate
I was bored and disappointed by this. The initial chapters, covering the childhood and schooldays of the Mirabal sisters, seemed promising enough. And I have no complaints about the final scenes, where the tension was certainly screwed up very tight.But in the middle was a wasteland of mundane domesticity, which Alvarez doesn’t know how to render interesting even when it’s spiced up with low-key revolutionary activity. As for the latter, I could never quite work out what the active members of the family were trying to achieve, apart from registering their opposition to Trujillo. Their doings seemed very unlikely to cause the regime any more than trivial irritation, though they certainly succeeded in drawing attention to themselves. They go on for years prodding and poking this very dangerous beast until eventually, to no one’s amazement, they get themselves shot. It all comes across as rather futile, which can’t have been Alvarez’ intention. Nor can she have intended to make Trujillo the star turn, though in fact he’s ten times more interesting than anyone else in the book. This says more about them than it does about him.None of this is meant to disparage Las Mariposas of history, about whom I know nothing. I am only reacting to the way Alvarez portrays them here, which for the most part is very tediously indeed.
—Arcadius
I got distracted again by life. It really needs to stop getting in the way like that. Last book that was half read on the plane and half in a jet-lagged state was In the Time of Butterflies. This poor book got a bit more love than I would like, as I'm pretty meticulous with my books, as I had a mother of a cold on the plane and sneezed, causing me to wave my hands in the air like a numpty, which then collected my G&T and doused my lap and my book in too much tonic and not enough gin. At least I missed the two unfortunate women sitting next to me...Besides the wiggly and alcoholic state of the book, I actually liked the book. I am hesitant when there are a few narrators and they they use diaries to describe their life events etc. But this book balances it beautifully. It has first person narration, scribbles in personal diaries as well as third person observations about the....This post was briefly interrupted by the fact that I tried to shift my weight on my computer chair by leaning on one arm and moving my body. At this stage all the screws holding the chair to the frame fell out on the left hand side of the chair, propelling me over the right hand arm rest I was leaning on and landing on my head on the floor. I have now spent 10 minutes finding the appropriate allen key to screw in all the screws again and am back in business.....dictatorship of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and the story of the 4 Mirabel sisters and their attempts through the Underground, where they were collectively known as the Las Mariposas (the butterflies), to overthrow him.Who am I kidding? I am not going to recover this post! Good book, well written, nice introduction albeit fictionally into the world of dictatorships in Central America.For more reviews visit http://rusalkii.blogspot.com.au/
—Rusalka
