Comment by svara

I agree, and I agree with that recommendation.

It's the first one of his books that I read and I remember being completely in awe at his ability to write a novel as if he had a machine that allowed him to look into the minds of anyone at any time or place and then document what he saw.

That novel is about a totalitarian system, that of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and it's eerie how I started seeing the little details of human behavior that enable it in the story elsewhere later as well.