Having discovered that Rachel Kushner's Italian translator is a lady I met, I decided to read another one of her books (and didn't have too many reservations about reading it in translation).
While I greatly enjoyed the writing, I felt that the book spent too much time setting the scene and providing historical background - probably because I'm reasonably familiar with the history of the Cuban revolution, partly because I teach about it, partly because I have watched The Godfather Part 2...
Still, once the plot "gets to the point" the book shares a number of similarities with many of my beloved suburban middle-class American novels, and that's a huge selling point. Also, it ultimately does a really good job of explaining how monoculture in general (and United Fruit in particular) messed up a country and its people.
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