The Feast of the Goat
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1alexdaw
Am creating this thread for The Feast of the Goat in case anyone else reads it.....It's one of two I found at Kenmore Library this morning...thought I'd better leave Travesuras de la niña mala for someone else.
2rebeccanyc
I read it this year -- an excellent and horrifying book.
3jfetting
I just finished The Feast of the Goat today, and I agree with Rebecca that it was both excellent and horrifying. How could things like this happen? I was furious with Pupo Roman in this book; Mario Vargas Llosa did such a great job setting everything up that Pupo's lack of action almost made me sick to my stomach. I think this is my favorite of the more political novels, so far. The way that the multiple storylines and the multiple viewpoints came together around the assassination was just brilliantly done.
4lriley
FWIW the Trujillo dictatorship was just as horrifyingly portrayed in Vazquez Montalban's Galindez.
5rebeccanyc
Here, by the way, is the review I posted when I read it last year:
In this novel, which explores how dictatorship twists the minds, hearts, and souls of those who are made or seduced to depend on the dictator for their livelihood, prestige, and power, Vargas Llosa interweaves the fictionalized history of the last weeks of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic with the story of the plotters who aim to assassinate Trujillo and the tale of Uranita, the daughter of a disgraced Trujillo associate, who left the DR suddenly at the age of 14, right before the assassination, and who returns 35 years later, after no contact with her family, to her dying father's bedside.
The plot and the structure of the book unfold slowly at the start, but the tension builds as the novel progresses: we know Trujillo will be killed, but then what will happen, and why is Uranita so bitter? At the end, I could barely put the book down. Vargas Llosa is a master at creating the varied characters of the Trujillo hangers-on and at bringing the readers into the horror of the regime and its aftermath, some of it truly sickening and requiring a strong stomach.
About half way through the novel, one of the characters reflects that he has lost his free will; Vargas Llosa's genius is that he makes the reader think about this too.
In this novel, which explores how dictatorship twists the minds, hearts, and souls of those who are made or seduced to depend on the dictator for their livelihood, prestige, and power, Vargas Llosa interweaves the fictionalized history of the last weeks of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic with the story of the plotters who aim to assassinate Trujillo and the tale of Uranita, the daughter of a disgraced Trujillo associate, who left the DR suddenly at the age of 14, right before the assassination, and who returns 35 years later, after no contact with her family, to her dying father's bedside.
The plot and the structure of the book unfold slowly at the start, but the tension builds as the novel progresses: we know Trujillo will be killed, but then what will happen, and why is Uranita so bitter? At the end, I could barely put the book down. Vargas Llosa is a master at creating the varied characters of the Trujillo hangers-on and at bringing the readers into the horror of the regime and its aftermath, some of it truly sickening and requiring a strong stomach.
About half way through the novel, one of the characters reflects that he has lost his free will; Vargas Llosa's genius is that he makes the reader think about this too.
