skopia
Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey, desperate for love and buried in fantasy novels. Díaz runs his family through Trujillo's dictatorship in footnotes where history and comic books collide.
Assassins wait in a car for Trujillo's Chevrolet on his last night. Vargas Llosa moves between them, the dictator's failing body, and the woman who returns thirty-five years later to accuse her father.
In an unnamed Latin American capital, a beggar's killing of a colonel gives a dictator the pretext to destroy his enemies. Asturias renders the terror as fever dream, in prose that hallucinates.
At what moment did Peru screw itself up? A newspaperman and his father's chauffeur drink through an afternoon in a Lima bar called the Cathedral, and their talk rebuilds a country under dictatorship.
In the theocracy that replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Atwood put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere.