Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa
Along with G.G. Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa is the most famous representative of Latin American literature. He won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
This review is about the novel "Feast of the Goat". It is a novel in which Llosa deals with a lasting feature of South American history - a tough dictatorial regime in Dominican Republic.
In the novel, Llosa takes us through three levels of narration to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for a full 3 decades (from 1930 to 1961). The novel is composed of three different, closely related stories.
The first tells of Urania Cabral, the daughter of a former Dominican Senate president, who returns to visit her ailing father after a thirty-year absence, recalling a childhood spent in a dictatorship.
The second describes 1961 and follows the preparations and execution of the assassination of Trujillo, as well as the social changes that followed that act. It is a time when only Trujillo’s decadent circle of close associates enjoys abundance and privileges while the rest of the nation lives in fear and poverty.
The third describes Trujillo's dialogues with his main aides, and at the same time we get to know Trujillo's personality and the methods of his dictatorial rule in detail.
Llosa delivers an extremely successful psychological characterization of actors that allows an easy understanding of the motivation of their actions.
This is a layered literary work characterized by constant changes of narrative subjects and perspectives, which vividly depicts all aspects of life under the boot of a cruel dictatorial regime.
"Through a small attic window, high in the room, Urania glimpsed the moon: round and yellow, bright. There are no such moons in New York."
"In New York, no one looks at women with such audacity anymore. Measuring her, weighing her, estimating how much flesh there is on each of her breasts and thighs, how much hair on her pubis, and the exact roundness of her buttocks."
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