As for cane fields, Junot is right. They’re terrifying and you should never walk into one in the DR or anywhere else. Being led into one by either a gun or a paycheck spells a severely abbreviated life.

About the fuku, here’s how I interpreted it: I didn’t think the family was actually cursed, but that the fuku was introduced because the things that happened in these peoples’ lives were so horrific that it’s almost tempting to look for a supernatural explanation. If there were a curse, all that senseless violence would at least make some kind of sense.

The same goes for all the comparisons between Trujillo and Sauron. It almost suggests that the things he did are too horrible to be real, while at the same time underlining the fact that yes, they are indeed real. People do things that cruel to one another.

Blake – I totally agree. It’s frustrating to not be able to understand what is being communicated to you, particularly when the point of a book (or movie) is the communication of ideas. I could understand most of the Spanish in this book, but I still felt like I missed a lot.

Dan – I think the Bible is kind of its own beast, as a translation, but I think there can be some merit to having other languages in the book. For instance, in this book, I thought that maybe the author was showing his readers what it felt like to be excluded by language boundaries, while at the same time capturing the dialect of his characters.

Rebecca – Thanks for reading. I hope I didn’t spoil anything for you because you should really read this book.