The Feast of the Goat: A Novel

This is a wonderful study of power and charisma and the primal hold it can have on men in a setting which will be unfamilar to most young British readers. Trujillo ruled the Dominican Rebuplic with an iron grip from the early 1930s to the early 1960s. He was adept at understanding the motivations of his subordinates as well as their potentialities. His inner circle and society more widely appeared held in his spell. Told from different perspectives including the daughter of a cabinet minister, various members of the opposition and Trujillo himself, this novel fizzes with invention and insights into the nature of human power and human fragility. [Slight spoiler] The final third of the book dealing with the transition after Trujillo's fall is particularly riveting.

Brutal, and uncompromising do not buy this book if you are squeamish. The books starts off slowly- a brilliant middle-aged (polymath) woman, Urania Cabral, the daughter of the former Secretary Of State to the Dominican Republic visits her father who is barley alive- he cannot speak but we think he can listen and understand what she is saying. She speaks to her father for the first time in thirty years about what her father did when she was a little girl. Whilst she has been away she has, as an obsession/ hobby, studied the recent history of the Dominican Republic and in particular the regime of her fathers boss General Rafael Trujillo. The story she tells is horrific- you will have to read it to find out what happens .... believe me the denouement is extreme and comes at you like an express train. My favourite chapter is one of extreme calm, the interregnum and Joaquin Balauer scheming and taking ultimate control. Totally Machiavellian, absolutely mesmerizing Mario Vargas Llosa is a great writer. The book is a must read because, as George Santayana said in 1905, 'Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it!'

Since we have just visited a central American country I found this book very evocative , pertinent and chilling because it echoes some of we have just observed. A fictionalised account it is true but a powerful tale I would say of how dictatorships in general operate . A great read, partly because in Europe we tend to know little of the background or current state of central America .

Llosa writes an electric narrative that sweeps the reader from page to page and chapter to chapter. "The Feast of the Goat" is a political and historical novel yet the "novel"(the story) is not lost for all its political and historical information. As such it carries the history beyond "History" to tragedy worthy of the Greeks. Llosa uses Truillo, the Dominican dictator, to define the "Cadillo" form of government strongman that has plagued South America and the Caribbean in the modern era. Batista, Peron, Castro, Chaves, Maduro are just a few in the list of "King Rats" that have come to power in Latin America.

Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, is likely the most renowned and acclaimed author in contemporary Peruvian literature. His historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000, is set in the Dominican Republic. It examines the reign and fall of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who ruled over the Caribbean nation from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Vargas Llosa’s outstanding novel provides a realistic look inside the regime of one of the most brutal autocrats of the twentieth century. In 1996, a Dominican American woman named Urania Cabral returns to her homeland for the first time in 35 years. She fled the island nation as a teenager and was raised in the United States, where she built a successful career for herself in New York City. Since her departure from the Dominican Republic so long ago, Urania has not spoken to her now aged father, a former high-ranking senator in the Trujillo administration, nor to any of her relatives. Now, seeing her father for the first time in over three decades brings to the surface anger and resentment for a wrong he inflicted on her all those years ago, the nature of which is initially concealed from the reader. The story is not a strictly linear narrative but rather jumps around chronologically. In scenes of 1961 the reader sees both the Trujillo regime at the height of its power and the assassination that brought about its downfall. In between chapters on Urania and the Cabral family, Vargas Llosa examines in great detail the killing of the dictator and its aftermath, telling the story from the multiple perspectives of Trujillo’s enemies and allies. While the Cabral family is entirely fictitious, nearly all the other characters in the book, Trujillo included, are actual historic personages. The large ensemble cast comprise a complex web of corruption, oppression, and atrocity that illuminates in intricate detail the horrors of life under the unchecked power of a brutal autocrat. What’s pleasantly surprising about The Feast of the Goat is that, for the work of a Nobel laureate, it is a remarkably accessible read. That’s not to say that Vargas Llosa has dumbed down the work in any way, only that he writes in engaging, articulate prose, free of gratuitous verbal ostentation, that emphasizes substance over style. This novel reads like a political thriller that might have been written by an author of bestselling potboilers were it not for the unflinchingly frank authenticity with which Vargas Llosa sets his scenes. While Trujillo is an infamous monster and Urania somewhat of a saint, the remaining cast of characters are painted in varying life-like shades of gray that blur the lines between heroes and villains, predators and prey. The plot includes a few very disturbing scenes of torture, execution, and rape that illustrate the violent excesses...