The Feast of the Goat

Product Information

Servat, Alberto (October 6, 2007), "La fiesta del Chivo", El Comercio, Lima , retrieved 2008-04-16 . Revenge by Proxy / Sins of Our Fathers: When Trujillo's family starts chasing the conspirators, suddenly all their families become fair game.

The Loins Sleep Tonight: Trujillo has a little problem with a girl some nights before his murder. At the end it's revealed that the girl was Urania Cabral. Replace Trujillo's name with that of any other tyrant -- Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein -- and you have in Vargas Llosa's analysis a penetrating account of what happens when even the best people -- "the intellectuals of the country, the lawyers, doctors, engineers, often graduates of very good universities in the United States or Europe, sensitive, cultivated men of experience, wide reading, ideas, presumably possessing a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, men of feeling and scruples" -- come under the influence of a potent mixture of ambition and fear.

Walford, Lynn (2006), "Vargas Llosa's Leading Ladies", in Fuentes, Yvonne; Middleton, David; Parker, Margaret (eds.), Leading Ladies: Mujeres en la Literatura Hispana y en Las Artes, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, pp.70–80, ISBN 0-8071-3082-6 . This ugly, mesmerising, masterly novel is as steeped in facts as Macbeth was in blood. Nothing could be further from the popular idea of the South American novel, and nothing could be a more remarkable demonstration of its strengths, obsessions and direction. (...) It is a splendid novel, imbued with a passionately driving commitment." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator Most of the characters are taken from life, and Mr Vargas Llosa has captured the dictator and his supporters so well that the book has caused scandal and embarrassment in Santo Domingo. Although he is not a fine stylist, few writers can match Mr Vargas Llosa for storytelling. His words serve the unfolding plot." - The Economist Trujillo was officially dictator only from 1930 to 1938, and from 1942 to 1952, but remained in effective power throughout the entire period. Though his regime was broadly nationalist, Daniel Chirot comments that he had "no particular ideology" and his economic and social policies were basically progressive. [6]

Trujillo made him a colonel overnight when, in one of those inspirations that marked his political career, he decided to name him head of SIM. . . . Why did he do it? Not because Abbes was cruel but because he was cold: the iciest individual Trujillo had ever known in this country of hot bodies and souls." What disturbed me the most about the movie is that I got the feeling that if Puerto Rico were not under the territorial clause of the United States Constitution, it could easily be ruled today by a dictator like Rafael Trujillo, Batista or any of the other Latin American dictators. The only Spanish-language republic in South and Latin America, which never had a dictatorship, is Costa Rica.

Book contents

The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. The novel is a combination of fact and fiction. Blending together these two elements is important in any historical novel, but especially in The Feast of the Goat because Vargas Llosa chose to narrate an actual event through the minds of both real and fictional characters. [42] Some characters are fictional, and those that are non-fictional still have fictionalized aspects in the book. The general details of the assassination are true, and the assassins are all real people. [41] While they lie in wait for the Dictator to arrive, they recount actual crimes of the regime, such as the murder of the Mirabal sisters. [24] However, other details are invented by Vargas Llosa, such as Amadito's murder of the brother of the woman he loved. [24] T)he book miraculously restores Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to literary-master status. (...) It has been twenty years since Vargas Llosa came up with a novel this vivid and thrilling. No review can do justice to the abundant details and intrigues, the relentless pace yet utter translucency of The Feast of the Goat, much of which is historically true. (...) The book is nicely translated by Edith Grossman, although the dialogue portions could be more oral and colloquial" - Gene H. Bell-Villada, Commonweal