The Feast of the Goat Book

Mario Vargas Llosa, a former candidate for the presidency of Peru, is better placed than most novelists to write about the machinations of Latin American politics. In The Feast of the Goat he offers a vivid recreation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo's insidious and evil regime. Told from several viewpoints, the book has three distinctive, alternating strands. There is Urania Cabral, the daughter of Trujillo's disgraced secretary of state, who has returned to Santo Domingo after more than 30 years. Now a successful New York lawyer, Urania has never forgiven her ageing and paralysed father, Agustín, for literally sacrificing her to the carnal despot in the hope of regaining his political post. Flipping back to May of 1961, there is a group of assassins, all equally scarred by Trujillo, waiting to gun the Generalissimo down. Finally there is an astonishing portrait of Trujillo--the Goat--and his grotesque coterie. Llosa depicts Trujillo as a villain of Shakespearean proportions. He is a preening, macho dandy who equates his own virility with the nation's health. An admirer of Hitler "not for his ideas but for the way he wore a uniform" (fittingly he equips his secret police force with a fleet of black Volkswagen Beetles), Trujillo even has his own Himler in Colonel Abbes Garcia: a vicious torturer with a predilection for the occult. Although once "the spoiled darling of the Yankees" this arch manipulator whose corruption permeates every aspect of Dominican life, is now viewed as a serious liability by Kennedy's government and several members of his own ruling elite. As the novel edges toward Trujillo's inevitable murder, Urania's story (the novel's weakest link) gets a bit lost in the action; the remaining narratives, however, are rarely short of mesmerising. Trujillo's death unleashes a new order but not the one expected by the conspirators. Enslaved by the soul of the dead chief, neither they nor the Trujillo family--who embark on a hideous spree of bloody reprisals--are able to fill the void. Llosa has them all skilfully outmanoeuvred by the puppet-president Joaquín Belaguer, a former poet who is the very antithesis of the machismo Goat. Savage, touching and bleakly funny, this compelling book gives an all too human face to one of Latin America's most destructive tyrants. --Travis ElboroughRead More