Meticulously researched - so at least it certainly seems - and filled with telling detail, it portrays the inner workings of the Trujillo regime and its opposition with what gives every appearance of verisimilitude and authority.ĭespite Vargas Llosa's fictionalization of history, in form the novel resembles a straightforward recounting of Trujillo's last days.
The Feast of the Goat most decidedly belongs in the former category. Historical fiction is an honorable genre in which much distinguished work has been done as well as a good deal of schlock. There is of course ample precedent for this, not in the tawdry "docudramas" of Hollywood but - to cite the most obvious example - the historical plays of William Shakespeare. Many if not most of the novel's principal characters were actual figures in the Trujillo government and the plot to overthrow it they appear here not as mere background figures but as living, breathing people, endowed by Vargas Llosa with words, emotions and deeds.
Readers who are troubled (as I am) by the tendency of contemporary culture to blur beyond distinction the line between fiction and fact will find much in The Feast of the Goat to trouble them, for Vargas Llosa has taken rather extravagant liberties with known historical fact.
It is a historical novel, set in the Dominican Republic in 1961 as events moved inexorably toward the assassination of the merciless dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Now, with The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa has written his most transparently political work of fiction. The aristocratic, sophisticated Vargas Llosa was expected to win but was upset by the little-known Alberto Fujimori, an experience about which Vargas Llosa wrote with considerable bitterness in his memoir A Fish in the Water, published in 1994. In his case not merely is there a distinctly political cast to much of what he has written, but in 1990 he went so far as to run for the presidency of his native Peru, which at the time was in a state of terror induced by the radical leftist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Like many other prominent Latin American writers of fiction and poetry, Mario Vargas Llosa is almost as deeply involved in politics as in literature. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
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