Rating: 
Summary: I found it insulting
Review: I had high hopes for this book, having lived and worked in the Dominican Republic, where I have good friends. I give this book such a low rating because it was written seemingly without critical reflection on the effects and workings of torture. It subverts its own cause; the book is its own worst enemy. It is pop history.I can say three positive things for this book, and only three: its prose is nice, it reveals a history with regard to the rise of Balaguer that is important to know, and most importantly, the main characte's voice (that of Urania) dominates the testimony in the book. This last point is the most interesting. Many books and movies about dictatorships depend on the villian/torturer confessing. This places the vindication of a victim's testimony on the torturer. It is the torturer's account of what happened that makes the victim's testimony valuable, in this scenario. Urania's father, being at least implicated in the crimes of Trujillo's regime, never has the chance to confess because his is too old and sick to speak. The most important voice is that of Urania, the victim. But the book was written on a formula. The characters are completely hollow, and merely repeat stereotypes and truisms. Urania plays the ever-suffering victim, nobly confessing and living through her tragedy. Vargas Llosa has her say something like, "Other women would have overcome it, but I could not." Vargas Llosa does not tell us why. In fact, why and who is Urania remain a mystery throughout the book. Those that are described well are the men and the torturers, never the women and the victims. This dichotomy I find disturbing, as well as pairing men with tortureres and women with victims. Also disturbing is the fact that Vargas Llosa builds the book to its climax (pun intended and necessary) and the reader with it, leading a voyeuristic voyage in watching torture and rape like it is the dessert or the raison d'etre for the book. It is not, or rather, should not be. Truth about Trujillo, if it remains a story of torturers and not of victims, it perpetuates a subjugation, once again, of those people struggling to find their daily lives livable. Other authors, like Clarice Lispector resist voyeurism, resist the enjoyment that comes with watching or reading torture, by breaking up the story, the narration reflexively. (I have in mind Hour of the Star.) The techniques that can be used to give dignity to victims of dictatorships are out there; Vargas Llosa elects not to use them. Other smaller points: the chapter describing Balaguer's rise to power is interesting, but paints him out to be a savior. He was as much a bastard as his predecessor, but more descreet. I find that without at least a reference to the debate about Balaguer's beneficence or criminality irresponsible. Vargas Llosa's silly repetition of Trujillo's prostate and impotence problems seem like a machista man making fun of a machista dictator. This erases the role that machismo has in caudillo-ism, the type of dictatorship that Trujillo created with the partial consent of the Dominican people. He was the Father, the Benefactor. Overall, the book made me angry and sick. There have been many good reviews of this book because it has opened, seemingly, a dialogue with the past that has just begun to grow. This is good. However, this is an issue of timing, and not of quality.
Rating: 
Summary: For Larry
Review: I thought that Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Feast of the Goat did an excellent job of combining a historical account of a dictatorship with the impact and implications it had on people's lives. The moral conclusions, subtly displayed through the consequence of events, were both personal and political. I thought the construction of the book was very useful in creating a kind of emotional impact and reinforcing themes. One of the most effective tools Llosa used was juxtaposition-family and politics, appearance and ability, past and present. It showed the complicity of human motives and the inevitable fallibility of all the characters, despite ability or will. The most powerful display of this was in Trujillo himself. His obsession with appearance and clothing contrasted with the vulgarity of his personality. Family was a major concern for every character in the book, and the dictator squandered titles and money on family members he knew were incompetent, all for the sake of reputation. Though he considered himself to be the savior of the republic, he wasted valuable resources covering the atrocities of his sons and brothers. It is an excellent display of human weakness; one man, however powerful, can only do so much work, and he will naturally be swayed by self-interest and people around him. It was also interesting how little political control any of the characters had, including Trujillo. The top officials in the government were so enslaved by their commitment to the leader that they lost voice and dignity. Political savvy and personal pride riddled the dictator, who would shame or praise valuable followers for trivial matters. Subtly throughout there was the pervasive, silent control of the United States, the favor of whose enormous power could crush or save a smaller country's government. The book was great at portraying the present thoughts of a real, powerful man in a dilemma, distracted by gossip and desires. A confusing element was that, though the book seemed to praise Belaguer's presidency after Trujillo's assassination, the present-day country was described as a worse, more impoverished place that missed the dictator because they forgot the evil he allowed. The book never answered this discrepancy, nor commented on the blind eye Belaguer turned to torture and secrecy.
One of the best parts of the book was the emotions and motivations of the characters. Most of the book was narrated from two points of time-the day of Trujillo's assassination and Urania's visit to her home thirty years later. The assassins were each described the afternoon they were waiting in a car to assassinate Trujillo, all deep in reflection of the wrongs he inflicted on them. One is religious and despises the immorality of the regime, plagued by his own sins. Others are motivated by disappearances or deaths in the families, others by pride. The book goes into the minds with all of the complexity and confusion of thought and memory, with clever storytelling that explores the causes for human motivation and the repercussions of unbridled power on average lives. Most effective was Urania's story, who, a lifetime later, was still suffering from Trujillo. Her neat, attractive appearance masked scars from childhood. She wasn't affected directly by the politics of the country, but by Trujillo and the deism that surrounded him, something practiced to the point of obsession by her own father. Classic storytelling would leave her cured of her problems at the end of the book, but the narrative leaves her still with deep mental wounds, working slowly towards some kind of healing. Overall, Feast of the Goat is a great portrayal of the mind's reaction to pressure, pain, and subjugation. It seems like some of the feeling is lost in translation, unfortunately, but the construction of the book is really excellent and subtle.
Rating: 
Summary: The Feast of the Goat
Review: I was very impressed by the way the author used Urenia's character to submerge the reader deep into the story which takes place during Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic. As a Dominican, this book has sparked an interest in knowing more about Dominican history during this era. Vargas was able to take the reader back in time and experience what could have gone through the minds of those people in the regime, especially Trujillo, and those opposed to it as was the case of the June 14th movement. Thus, giving a human touch to the story. I admired the courage of the members of the June 14th movement. Their determination to free this country from Trujillo's dictatorship that oppressed the Dominican people for over 30 years. They not only risked their lives, but also placed the lives of their loved ones in danger. This to me is the ultimate sacrifice. Throughout the book I asked myself how much of what I read in the book is factual. As far as I know most of the characters were real with the exception of Urenia and her family. It would be amazing if they were real people as well. No matter if any of it is true or not, the author did a wonderful job. He offers the reader a chance to travel back in time and has allows him to share the experience of so many people during this time of oppression in the Dominican Republic. It is a great book!
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant and disturbing literary masterpiece.
Review: If you think a novel about the Trujillo Era (1930-61) in the Dominican Republic would be boring, think again. Mario Vargas Llosa's THE FEAST OF THE GOAT is a work of literary brilliance. "Literature is fire," writes Vargas Llosa, a writer touted by critics to become the next Spanish-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his latest novel radiates with the incendiary heat of Machiavellian politics, sexual obsession, and bestial brutality. To the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was known as Chief, Generalissimo, the Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, and His Excellency. To his enemies, Trujillo was the Beast and the Goat. For more than three decades, Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist. He had cut the Gordian knot of the "Haitian problem" by having between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians slaughtered. In 1961, writes Vargas Llosa, "the country had touched bottom, placed under quarantine because of the excesses of a regime which, although in the past it had performed services that could never be repaid, had degenerated into a tyranny that provoked universal revulsion." On the mild, starry night of Tuesday, May 30, 1961, the 70-year-old Trujillo, suffering from bouts of incontinence and impotence, was being driven from his palace in Ciudad Trujillo (Santo Domingo de Guzman) to his Mahogany House in San Cristobal, for another of his orgies--"to prove again he was a man." On the highway to San Cristobal, seven men stationed in three cars lay in ambush to assassinate him. THE FEAST OF THE GOAT has three storylines:
(1) The story of Urania Cabral, now 49, who returns to the Dominican Republic in 1996, after 35 years absence from her homeland. At age 14 she had been cynically betrayed by her own father, Sen. Augustin Cabral, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Trujillo regime.
(2) The story of those who plotted a military-civilian junta and were successful in tyrannicide but were captured by Trujillo's son.
(3) The story of Trujillo himself, who (like Joseph Stalin, but on a lesser scale) accomplished much good but was also "the person in whom all the strands of the dread spider web [of tyranny, corruption, and terror] converged." THE FEAST OF THE GOAT is not for the squeamish. Its explicit language and shocking scenes of sex, violence, and torture depict the decadent life of "a small country, a huge hell." In a novel of this type, however, such excesses are non-gratuitous; one cannot imagine an adequate or realistic description of the Trujillo Era apart from such graphic scenes. The entire atmosphere of the Trujillo Era has a Kafkaesque quality. Like something in The Trial, a person could be arrested, tried, tortured, and executed and never discover his offense. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Trujillo's dictatorship is that it caused men such as Sen. Augustin Cabral, who otherwise would have remained decent, to betray their own flesh and blood. Although the word masterpiece often is overworked, I shall risk it here. THE FEAST OF THE GOAT may well be the best novel of the year.
Rating:
Summary: A "crossover," literary fiction with immense popular appeal.
Review: In prose which is dense, dramatic, and saturated with images of violence of all kinds, Vargas Llosa reconstructs the final, tumultuous years of Rafael Trujillo's despotism in the Dominican Republic. Using three points of view to give breadth to the portrait of the country in 1961, the author cycles the chapters through three distinct viewpoints: that of Urania Cabral, a contemporary 49-year-old woman who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time in 35 years, and who shares her reminscences of her life there in 1961, when her father was President of the Senate; that of Trujillo himself as he reflects on his declining health, his 31 years in power, and his relationships with subordinates, the church, and the U.S.; and that of four conspirators waiting to ambush and assassinate "The Goat," as they individually recall the events which have driven them to take this final step. The heavily masculine atmosphere, redolent of whiskey and sex, and full of dramatic scenes of intrigue, sudden violence, graphically depicted torture, and casual murder, reflects the realities of life under Trujillo--nothing is gratuitous or irrelevant. In fact, the book's only "soft" feelings are elicited by Urania's story and her long-term rejection of her father after his betrayal of her, thirty-five years ago, when she was fourteen. While this is the least "important," and perhaps least effective, of the story lines, it gives a necessary feminine perspective on the violence and on Trujillo's government, and it keeps the reader from becoming overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the violence in the other stories. The scope of this novel is large, and it is well worth the reader's effort to concentrate, during the first hundred pages, on the large cast of characters and their interrelationships. All these characters are integral to the final outcome, and as they rotate among the three story lines, the reader benefits from increasingly broader and more subtle portraits which emerge from the new points of view, making the conclusion and the political aftermath of the assassination especially intriguing. This is a beautifully developed novel of power and its excesses, presented lucidly and unambiguously.
Rating:
Summary: A Literary Guide to Tyrants
Review: Literature is oftentimes a better way to understand the motivations of historical figures than non-fiction histories. It gives us an insight into the thought processes of a people and individuals in a way that a mere repetition of events and dates cannot. The Feast of the Goat allows the reader to understand the events in the Dominican Republic at the time of the assassination of the dictator Trujillo. The chilling fact is how similar his story and that of his family and cronies is to those of more modern tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Milosevic in Serbia. The fathers control life and death ostensibly for the greater good of their people and their children grow up to be twisted murderers and rapists because of all they have seen and been allowed to do. Their cronies and family members are willing to endure any abuse to maintain their power and wealth. Mario Vargas Llosa achieves a very memorable and readable account of one of the Caribbean's great tyrants. The book is slow going for the first 100 pages because so much time has to be spent in teaching the reader about the people and events in the Dominican Republic at the time. The book picks up pace and excitement as it moves along and the events of the assassination and its after effects are compelling. The assumption of power after the assassination by Balaguer, the meek intellectual and puppet of Trujillo, is fascinating. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword. Llosa is a wonderful author, but I found this book less satisfying than his previous book Death in the Andes. It tries to achieve too much in four hundred pages since it has three separate plot lines. The most compelling is the view inside Trujillo's own mind. The plot line following the assassins is less compelling since there are so many of them and it is difficult to get to interested in their individual stories. The least satisfying story is that of Urania, the daughter of one of Trujillo's trusted functionaries. It would have made an interesting short story, but instead the story drags out throughout the whole book without any suspense since we always know the shocking secret that she is going to reveal. Nevertheless it is a very worthwhile read and will provide most readers with a view to the bloody past history of a country with many immigrants to the US and also another less than edifying spectacle of past US misdeeds and intervention in the Americas.
Rating: 
Summary: Wanted to Like the Book More
Review: Llosa "Feast of the Goat" tries to weave three narratives together. These are the stories of the many characters who supported the assassination of Trujillo; the thoughts of Trujillo himself; and the issues of woman who comes back to Dominican Republic after 30 years in America. She returns to come to terms with her incapacitated father, a man of integrity who was a former Trujillo supporter. But as Llosa tells the stories of these many characters, he is also intent on giving us a history lesson, naming real names and describing brutal events, conveying his political outrage. For me, the effect of this history was to fragment his narrative, keeping me from developing a sustained interest. Basically, his narrative repeatedly breaks apart with distracting bursts of Llosa's historical anger and disbelief. For me, the great novel explaining a political event in the 1960's remains DeLillo's "Libra", which gets inside of Lee Harvey Oswald, plausibly explaining how Oswald thought while also serving as a biography of his life. Libra joins the novel seamlessly to history. "Feast of the Goat" doesn't.
Rating:
Summary: The horror of a dictatorship
Review: Mario Vargas Llosa has always shown a great energy in his approach of themes and subjects, with a literary production full of life and strength. "The Feast of the Goat" is no exception to the rule. The author has passionately researched the history of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo and added all the fictional spices and poison to a smooth and at the same time strong narrative. This is a work of fiction where history holds the main plot and it is pointless to draw a line between the real facts and the embroidery added by Vargas Llosa. The story recounts the last few days of a regime that lasted over 30 years, under the leadership of a man who knew no boundaries to power and no moral standards. Using a tri-dimensional approach, the story is retold from three perspectives: through the eyes of a woman (Urania) who has been assaulted in her femininity, through the eyes of the rebels who seek revenge, and through the eyes of the self-proclaimed "God on earth," the dictator. The plots intermingle, Urania's story is the weakest, the "Chivo" is murdered, and the aftermath of the rebels, the country and President Belanguer overtakes the last few chapters. There is no element of surprise in the outcome, it is all foretold and obvious. Mario Vargas Llosa addresses the social, historical, economical issues which constitute the backstage of Trujillo's dictatorship, but as well as his characters he is equally embellished by the power of the dictator and fails to understand why even those individuals with a broad education feel under the spell of Trujillo. Consequently, the book leaves a gap in terms of the psychological roots of the nature that leads to a dictator, understandably so since Vargas role is to relate facts dressed up in fiction, leaving the "why's" to historians. The use of compound names to which a nickname is added makes it rather difficult for the reader to identify who is being addressed. "The Feast of the Goat" is a strong book, a "macho" book, and a sad and horrendous revelation of the consequences of extreme ideologies, of power in its utmost negative side. Cases like the dictator Trujillo have abounded throughout history, his name can be easily substituted by many former and present dictators. With his usual audacity and literary virtues, Vargas Llosa has retold the past and addressed an issue that should concern all of us in the present.
Rating:
Summary: History and Fiction Serve Up a Bitter, Powerful Feast
Review: Mario Vargas Llosa has written a powerful novel with The Feast of the Goat, dividing the story of a twentienth-century tyrant, Trujillo, between the goat himself, those destined to kill the goat, and one of the victims who holds her wounds so close to her that they have come to replace her own family and country. This works effectively and all the elements are interesting and integral. The book even picks up added narrative strength after the death of the Trujillo as the power vacuum is filled. In a dictatorship of this sort (any sort, actually) no one is left unchanged as the poison seeps through all society. This book is best at making the political personal. A frightening book, all the more so because of the great amount of historical truth among the fictional elements, yet always fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: Absolute Power - Absolute Corruption
Review: Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat: A Novel, is a tale that has great significance for all who wonder how tyrants gain and maintain power. I attacked this book over the course of a week. It is not an easy read since it drops as many names as a Tolstoy novel. These Latins have more nicknames, contractions, and diminutives than all of the Russians in Moscow. Like a good soldier I ploughed on, and soon the story came into full view. It is an examination of tyranny. Vargas Llosa peels back the shroud covering the reign of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and bares all of its cruelties, excesses and corruptions. He exposes the characteristics of an absolutist, and all I could think about was comparisons with the many other such beasts such as Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Mao, and, especially for me, Stalin. What makes such monsters tick? Where do they get their drive? How do they differ from powerful people in Western nations? From succesful and powerful people we may have known? Vargas Llosa plumbs the depths of Trujillo's evil, and I feel greatly enlightened by his observations. He examines the beast from Trujillo's own perpsective and from the points of view of those he has destroyed, corrupted and made powerful in their own right. It is the tale of not only the great leader and how his own life has been corrupted but of those who love him and many who hate and wish to kill him, all of them less human for having been touched by him. The story begins in the last days of Trujillo when President Kennedy's administration is leading the charge to undermine the regime. It flashes back and forth over the decades before and since and clearly demonstrates the sick depndencies that tyrants create in their wakes. He unveils the tough and wily monster who can see right into the hearts and minds of those he controls. This is a violent and perverted story; the most violent and sexually perverted that I have ever recommended. But these perversions are absolutely essential to the tale, and the author handles them perfectly. There is no bottom to the tyrant's cruelties, and his family is, if anything, even worse. It is all necessary to our understanding of such beasts. This book is for serious readers with an interest in government and power. It is the Holy Grail for those seeking to understand the psychology and methods of tyrants. This is a work of a genius at the top of his form. Oh to be able to write like this.
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