The Feast of the Goat

Edith Grossman has translated the poetry and prose of major Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel García Marquez, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero, as well as Mario Vargas Llosa.

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republicand finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved, ailing dictator whom Dominicans call "the Goat," controls his inner circle (including Urania's father, a secretary of state now in disgrace) with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution is already under way that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this magisterial and long-awaited novel, Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the terrible birth of a democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and to the victims, both innocent and complicit, who were drawn into his deadly orbit.

"Trollope might regard politics, sex and religion as the stuff of high comedy, but they are also at the dark heart of Mario Vargas Llosa's portrayal of the last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. This brilliant study of tyranny is not for the squeamish. Yet the sickening detail enables one to grasp how terror combined with corruption can paralyze an entire society, stifling the merest impulse toward resistance. The novel's account of the dictator's increasingly brutal efforts to hold power alternates with the story of one of his victims, a young girl whose father delivered her to 'the goat' for deflowering in hopes of regaining political favor. What lifts The Feast of the Goat into the front rank of political novels is the author's depiction of how, against all odds, probabilities were finally shifted in the direction of democracy. In Vargas Llosa's telling, a few courageous priests and sisters stand out as forces for decency, and a crucial turning point occurs when all five Dominican bishops issue a pastoral letter condemning the regime."Wall Street Journal

"The book brings readers to the precipice of terror and lets us look into the abyss of cruelty as it poses and answers the question: Why do people not oppose dictators? . . . He has by his body of work already secured a place as one of the monumental writers of our time."The Boston Globe

"Poignant, moving, and immensely readable . . . engaging and insightful . . . A new book by Mario Vargas Llosa always provokes attention, for there are few novelists alive as dedicated as he is to the possibilities of fiction, in all its moods, modes, and manners."Alastair Reid, The New York Review of Books

"It is the novel's marvelous and complex formal mastery . . . that conquers the reader, in the way that the formal beauty of great musical composition does . . . I can't think of a novel that better dramatizes the way political evil can reach any of us in that innermost place. The Feast of the Goat is a masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written."Francisco Goldman, Bookforum

"Taking on the role more of narrating angel rather than avenging god, [Vargas Llosa] has brilliantly re-created one of the darkest periods in the recent history of the Americas."Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

"This is a dark, energetic, and powerful novel . . . The Feast of the Goat, a realist version of Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, offers no transcendence. Plotted for years, the assassination of Trujillo brings scant relief. This is a frightening, troubling book."Joan Mellen, The Baltimore Sun

"A gripping historical novel centering on the last days of the aging generalíssimo. The book is a remarkable and persuasive achievement."Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle

"While it is true that every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, you do not have to be Dominican, or Peruvian, to be engrossed by Vargas Llosa's deft account of trouble in the tropics. The story of a fastidious beast whose appetite devoured everything, including himself, The Feast of the Goat leaves an acrid aftertaste."Steven Kellman, Chicago Tribune

"In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa shows that a sweeping historical epic can still be great literature . . . Vargas Llosa takes the story of a long-murdered dictator and creates a meditation on memory, terror, and murderous complicity."Dylan Foley, The Denver Post

"Compelling and controversial, La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat) is a 'must read.'"Alberto Huerta, Hispanic Outlook

"With his tight and gripping storytelling