MARIO VARGAS LLOSA'S FEAST OF THE GOAT

NOBLE PRIZE FOR LITERATURE WINNER MARIO VARGAS LLOSA'S FEAST OF THE GOAT BOOK REVIEW

The Feast of the Goat is a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

By Heidi Johnson-Wright

A Mario Vargas Llosa book is a delicious treat to be savored by anyone who loves inspired, engaging writing. The treat is even sweeter for those of us Vargas Llosa fans who have come to love the Peruvian author’s alchemic gift for uniting vivid, captivating detail, characters one can practically hear breathing and good, old-fashioned storytelling.

Throughout his career, Vargas Llosa has skillfully crafted works that explore such subjects as the comedic (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), the sinister (Death in the Andes) and the erotic (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto). Sometimes he employs a microcosmic tale to represent macrocosmic issues. In The Storyteller, Vargas Llosa detailed one man’s quest for identity in order to explore the larger issue of acculturation and the marginalization of whole peoples.

In this novel, he is once again ambitious in scope, and he once again succeeds by steering clear of heavy-handedness and never forgetting the importance of the story at hand.

In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa delves into the nature of power: power of one man over many, power bastardized and corrupted into tyranny, and the inner power of those who want freedom so badly they will kill the tyrant, risking all they hold dear.

Vargas Llosa’s characters are based on or inspired by real people; his stage, the Dominican Republic, both before and after the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The book is framed and interspersed with the story of Urania Cabral, a Dominican native turned New York lawyer for the World Bank. She is outwardly successful, but an emotional train wreck. When Urania is not traveling the globe on noble, weighty business, she spends her time obsessed with the dark history of Trujillo’s repressive regime and its indelible imprint on the Dominican psyche.

The story opens with, after a 35-year absence from her homeland, Urania returning to confront her father: a frail, sick old man who was once an influential member of Trujillo’s inner circle. In Vargas Llosa’s sensual descriptions, we sense the trepidation and ambivalence Urania feels about coming home again.

“Her nose registers a range of odors as great as the endless variety of noises hammering at her ears: the oil burned by the motors of buses and escaping through their exhausts, tongues of smoke that dissipate or remain floating over the pedestrians; smells of grease and frying from a stand where two pans sputter and food and drinks are for sale; and that dense, indefinable, tropical aroma of decomposing resins and underbrush, of perspiring bodies, an air saturated with animal, vegetable, and human essences protected by a sun that delays their dissolution and passing. A hot odor that touches some intimate fiber of memory and returns her to childhood, to multicolored heartsease hanging from roofs and balconies, to this same Avenida Maximo Gomez.” (p. 10)

Woven in amongst the story of Urania’s need to exorcise ghosts from her past are disturbing flashback portraits of Trujillo and his cronies during the height of their reign. Vargas Llosa brilliantly conjures them before us, balancing their evil, charismatic, larger-than-life quality with their human failings of chemical dependencies and bad bladders. Most remarkable is Trujillo himself, an undeniably brilliant statesman who crafted a Stalin-worthy cult of personality while keeping his enemies and people in check with repression and torture.

“The man who, according to popular legend, did not sweat, did not sleep, never had a wrinkle on his uniform, his tuxedo, or his street clothes, and who…had, in effect, transformed this country. Not only because of highways, bridges, and industries he built, but also because in every sphere – political, military, institutional, social, economic – he was amassing such extraordinary power that all the dictators the Dominican Republic had endured in its entire history as a republic…were pygmies compared to him.” (pp. 81-82)

Equally unforgettable is Trujillo’s senior henchman Colonel Johnny Abbes Garcia, a venomous maggot of a man who could star in a thousand nightmares. Vargas Llosa makes us shiver each time he appears.

“They said a lot of things about Abbes, especially about his cruelty. It was an advantage for somebody in his position. They said, for example, that his father, an American of German descent, found little Johnny, still in short pants, sticking pins into the eyes of chicks in the henhouse. That as a young man he sold medical students cadavers he had robbed from graves in Independencia Cemetery.

Even with such fertile ground to exploit, the most compelling parts of The Feast of the Goat are the chapters depicting Trujillo’s assassins, set just before and after the killing of “the Goat.” Vargas Llosa delivers sympathetic, intimate portraits of the handful of men whose lives had been directly tainted by Trujillo yet took action not so much for themselves as for, what they believed to be the good of the Dominican people.

“The moon, round as a coin and accompanied by a blanket of stars, gleamed and turned the crests of the nearby coconut palms silver; Antonio watched them sway to the rhythm of the breeze. In spite of everything this was a beautiful country, damn it. It would be even more beautiful after they had killed the devil who in thirty-one years had violated and poisoned it more than anything else it had suffered in its history of Haitian occupation, Spanish and American invasions, civil wars, battles among factions and caudillos, and in all the catastrophes – earthquakes, hurricanes – that had assailed Dominicans from the sky, the sea, or the center of the earth.” (p. 78)


While the graphic passages of torture are difficult to read, Vargas Llosa does not include them gratuitously. His message is clear: knowledge and truth are power, ultimately more powerful than any tyrant, real or imagined.


Heidi Johnson-Wright resides in Miami, FL where she treasures the sea, sunshine and Cuban coffee.