This is my first go-around with Mario Vargas Llosa, and this book was the month’s choice for a world literature bookclub that was held back in May.
I had known for weeks that this was the chosen book, so I thought I had plenty of time to track down a copy to read. However, when I checked the local e-libraries, none of them had any of Vargas Llosa’s books available—in English. Interestingly, Harris County’s online library seems to have almost his entire back catalog in Spanish.
So I thought, why the hell not? I have six weeks, how hard can it be?
…Several renewals later and five days before bookclub, I found myself still less than a third of my way through the bloody thing. Overestimated my abilities, it transpires. So I ended up purchasing an English copy and finishing it up that way.
Now my knowledge of the of the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime is not exactly extensive by anyone’s reckoning; most of what I know comes from Alex von Tunzelmann’s Red Heat, and Trujillo was hardly the sole focus there. But what I do know was that the man was an evil piece of shit. And I know how he died.
The Feast of the Goat offers a semi-fictional recreation of Trujillo’s last days, seen through three different viewpoints, one of which is a fictionalised Trujillo himself—which is rather bold. We are also offered the point of view of the assassins that are preparing to off him and of Urania Cabral, the daughter of Trujillo’s disgraced (fictional) secretary of state. While the first two focus mostly on that fateful day in 1961, Urania’s narrative is primarily set 35 years after the event, well after she fled the republic and established herself as a career woman.
Now this is why I felt the need to explain how I read the book before jumping in with my review proper—there is a considerable degree of narrative switching throughout the book. This is paired with a good deal of telescoping. It’s a complex novel machinery being deployed, and until I switched to the translation, I was constantly lost. Now I am about ninety five percent sure that this was an issue entirely of my own making, but if there were some fits and stats to the early sections of the narrative, I’m unable to separate that out from my own acts of overextension.
But I had far less trouble during the latter half of the novel, and the effect of all the moving narrative parts working in concert allows us to see the almost paralysis the Trujillo regime had on the average Dominican—whether its the thoughts and actions of the assassins and their co-conspirators or Urania herself. Historically there was probably no exact counterpart to Amado García Guerrero and Luisa Gil, but Trujillo certainly subjected others to the same tests of faith as he did with these two as a display of his power. And while Urania and her father are also fictions, they appear as two representative examples of how under the shadow of a dictator, everyone is eventually guilty of something, no matter how loyal you are or how well you perform. Your proximity to the dictator does not offer security; you and your family both are always at risk of falling victim to some random whim.
But what do we see when we look out through the eyes of The Goat himself? For a man who projects largess, his thoughts are small and self centered. To me, what most stood out most about was how frequently he conflated his own virility with the heath of the nation—which by this point in 1961, is more a source of insecurity than anything else. This is not a man driven by some higher ordeal, this a man driven to violence over his prostate.
But the narrative does not end with the death of the goat—we follow the republic through the aftermath. The death of Trujillo did lead to the rise of a new order, but it’s not one that the conspirators would have hoped for. True to life, there’s not many happy endings here. But if there is someone who does rise to the top to surf the wave of chaos, it’s Joaquín Belaguer. Now I can’t remember where I first heard this but if you find a quiet, unassuming little nerd with glasses suspiciously close to the center of power in a murderous regime, do not take your eye of them. You don’t know what they are capable of. And if you yourself, are the dictator, maybe just shoot them straight away to save time.
This is not an enjoyable read; however, it provides a portrait of what a dictatorship looks like and its effects on those in both close and distant positions of power.
Maybe I’ll go back and finish the original one day; that’s a time commitment I can’t make right now.
For cbr16bingo, this is Liberate. Urania thinks she’s been freed from the dictatorship, at least it sees that way at first…
