 Latin American novels that explore political themes , but that do not centre upon the rule of a particular dictator , are informally classified as “ not quite dictator novels ” . For example , Libro de Manuel ( A Manual for Manuel , 1973 ) , by Julio Cortázar , is a postmodern novel about urban guerrillas and their revolutionary struggle , which asks the reader to examine the broader societal matters of language , sexuality , and the modes of interpretation . In the Time of the Butterflies ( 1994 ) , by Julia Álvarez , tells the story of the Mirabal sisters , whom patriotism transformed from well @-@ behaved Catholic débutantes to political dissenters against the thirty @-@ year dictatorship of the Trujillo régime in the Dominican Republic . The novel sought to illuminate the officially @-@ obscured @-@ history of the deaths of the Mirabal sisters , not to determine what happened to them , but to determine how the Mirabal sisters happened to the national politics of the Dominican Republic . In the mock @-@ diary “ Intimate Diary of Solitude ” ( third part of El imperio de los sueños 1988 ; Empire of Dreams , 1994 ) , by Giannina Braschi , the protagonist is Mariquita Samper , the diarist who shoots the narrator of the Latin American Boom in revolt against his dictatorial control of the fictional narration . Moreover , in Braschi ’ s most recent work “ United States of Banana ” ( 2011 ) , the Puerto Rican prisoner Segismundo overthrows his father , the King of the United States of Banana , who had imprisoned him for more than a hundred years in the dungeon of the Statue of Liberty , for the crime of having been born . The story of Distant Star ( 1996 ) , by Roberto Bolaño , begins on 11 September 1973 , with the coup d ’ état by General Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende , the President of Chile . The writer and professor of literature Raymond Leslie Williams describes the aforementioned novels as not @-@ quite @-@ dictator @-@ novels , which are reminiscent of the genre for being “ acutely and subtly political fiction ” that addresses themes different from those of the dictator novel , which cannot be divorced from the politics of the stories , and so each “ can be read as a meditation on the horror of absolute power ” . 
