In “The Feast of the Goat: A Novel,” by Mario Vargas Llosa, we are introduced to forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral. Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, Urania returns to her native Dominican Republic and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City, and one old man terrorized a nation of three million.
Rafael Trujillo, the depraved, ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle (including Urania’s father, a secretary of state now in disgrace) with a combination of violence and blackmail.
In this magisterial and long-awaited novel, Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the terrible birth of a democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and to the victims, both innocent and complicit, who were drawn into his deadly orbit.
