The Feast of the Goat: A Novel

One of my dissertation advisers recommended this book to me, and while it certainly related to my academic studies in U.S.-Latin American relations, I thought it was also a crackling good story with nicely developed human drama. The book has all the elements of a spy/politics story ala Tom Clancy, as well as a story of an individual dealing with the trials and tribulations of childhood and adulthood. Though my Spanish isn't nearly good enough to tackle a work of literature this complicated and nuanced, I'm told that this is also an excellent translation into English.

At nearly 500 pages this book is a quick read, one that rivets you in a combination of plot lines and extended Latino names. Llosa's at his flowery and poetic best as he weaves backdrop and action into a crescendo for the Trujillo dictatorship, a plot ending badly for the reviled dictator, and worse for its perpetrators.

He begins with a scene where a half-century old, NYC domiciled daughter, Urania Cabral, meets with her father, Augustin "egghead" Cabral, back in the DR for the first time since the assassination, a gap in time anchored by the year 1961 (the year in which the vile dictator is assassinated) against the coda of the present. Unfortunately he's a father who allowed his then 14-year old girl-child to be violated by Trujillo (then 70-years old and born before the Viagra revolution,) a capitulation inspired by his fear of Trujillo or by his attempts to win favor toward a better job in the dictator's administration, one where he is already the Secretary of State.

Though Urania is still angry with him, she meets her dad who's enfeebled by a stroke leaving him barely able to communicate much less care for himself. In this vignette she carries both ends of the conversation providing Llosa his backdrop to the story line. As the story unfolds, he alternates chapters which contrast the pre- and post-amble of the assassination with the story of Urania. Within this framework he intersperses scenes of chase, torture, imprisonment and terror against descriptions of everyday life in the DR; scenes so evocative that they cry out for a positive resolution, one which never comes or comes with such randomness as it might for men left to sharks by a sinking ship, of whom all are subjected to the uneven whims of, might we say, life's roulette wheel. In this case Trujillo holds the handle in his own chosen sway over any available morality, and as such he decides who gets to live and who must die.

And thus is the terror reign of Trujillo, one that lasted 35 years, depicted.

I personally prefer fewer words in a story and as such was given to speed reading whenever possible. Llosa's descriptions of the personnel reminded me of a string of Spanish names I learned like a poem at camp, one I attended as a boy in the Great Smokey Mountains, a camp shared with the many sons of Latino bureaucrats - it went like this: "Senor Gonzalez Chavez Rodriguez Lopes Martino Alfredo Consuegra Diego" and on and on - names strung together in a soft lilting multiplicity which simultaneously assaulted and lulled my senses, at least at the time. All of Llosa's characters seem to have these multiple names and he uses them in endless combinations. I guess it's the guy in me because I wanted to get to that part of the story where "His Excellency" gets his due; such an evil dude, you almost can't wait.

Trujillo reminds one of Mugabe, Castro, Stalin, and others who use or used the same methods like variants on a theme. If you've ever been to the Dominican Republic it gives you shivers to think what it must have been like to live there lo those many years ago. It was so bad, in fact, that the UN and other international bodies imposed trade sanctions in the hopes of curbing his most heinous excesses. As for the book, the scenes of torture carried out by Trujillo's secret police chief, Johnny Abbes Garcia, are the most jarring. And the scenes toward the end of Urania's ordeal at the hands of "the flaccid one," they're compelling in their own unseemly way. This is a good read and probably better in the original Spanish. Either way you won't want to put it down.

this novel about the plot to assassinate Rafael Trujillo
the dictator of the Dominican Republic. My first read of
this author, wonderful prose and colorful character development.
This book clarifies the clever mind of a brutal dictator,
a master manipulator and narcissistic beast (goat)

This is a great book. Required for my class. You can probably find this book a few bucks cheaper. I rather pay the extra dough and save on time and hassle wasted like waiting in line during the beginning days of school or waiting for the auction to end or hoping the seller ships your book to get it before the beginning weeks of class. Just save time and sanity and purchase from amazon.

"La fiesta del chivo", that's the original title in Spanish, is about the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship. He was all you can expect of a Latin American dictator: corrupt, silly, surronded by incompetence, violent and so on. It is amazing that such an individual could have run a country. But well, it happened and Mario Vargas Llosa describes it so well... You will be transported to that time through the life of Urania, the daughter of a member of Trujillo's regime, and history and novel will be melt in an incredible book.