The stories of the individual conspirators are not always easy to follow or to keep separate (...) and the overall plot of the novel holds few surprises. None the less, it makes compelling and often anxious reading, partly because you keep hoping that things are not going to be as bad as they could be. Almost inevitably, they are." - Phil Baker, Daily Telegraph We see the life of this man who loved his country and was politically brilliant, hard-working and fastidious. He was also a brutal and sadistic man. He sent his cronies on overseas missions so he could visit their wives who could dare not refuse his attentions. Trujillo was charismatic with a piercing gaze and high-pitched voice --- does that remind us of another brutal dictator in Europe?

Wolff, Andrew B. (2007), Rewriting Trujillo, Reconstructing a Nation: Dominican History in Novels by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Andrés L. Mateo, Viriato Sención, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Pennsylvania State University, ProQuest 305260952 {{ citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link). PhD dissertation. On the controversial nature of some of his work he said, “The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.” The Feast of the Goat ( Spanish: La Fiesta del Chivo, 2000) is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s, and its significance for the island and its inhabitants. The broad canvas, the political and military themes, the fast-moving narrative often enfolding different time-frames within a single scene, all conspire to make it fulfil the Spanish-speaking public's image of a Vargas Llosa novel more thoroughly than any of his other recent works." - Stephen Henighan, Times Literary Supplement But for a narrative brimming with horrors, the novel as a whole is oddly inert. It reads more like a history of the Dominican Republic than a fully achieved work of fiction. (...) This could have been -- and was obviously intended to be -- a major work. It does not read like one." - David Robson, Sunday TelegraphThe novel is a combination of fact and fiction. Blending together these two elements is important in any historical novel, but especially in The Feast of the Goat because Vargas Llosa chose to narrate an actual event through the minds of both real and fictional characters. [42] Some characters are fictional, and those that are non-fictional still have fictionalized aspects in the book. The general details of the assassination are true, and the assassins are all real people. [41] While they lie in wait for the Dictator to arrive, they recount actual crimes of the regime, such as the murder of the Mirabal sisters. [24] However, other details are invented by Vargas Llosa, such as Amadito's murder of the brother of the woman he loved. [24] Gussow, Mel (2002-03-28), "Lacing his Fiction with History: Vargas Llosa Keeps a Latin American Literary Boom Booming", The New York Times, vol.151, no.52071 , retrieved 2008-03-27 . He even managed to get the United States -- who put up with (and even fostered) a lot of bad behaviour in Latin and South America -- and the OAS to impose sanctions on the Dominican Republic by 1961 (without even flirting with the Soviets).

A fierce, edgy and enthralling book ... Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in doing so has written a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance."-- The New York Times There is a tidy novelistic completeness to this story, and I don't mean to diminish its horror or the firmness with which Vargas Llosa goes through with the telling of it. But it's hard, in a historical novel, to think of fictional characters as suffering in quite the same way as the historical ones do, and for me the real triumph of this book lies in its study of two people: José René Román (...) and Joaquín Balaguer" - Michael Wood, London Review of Books I Have No Son!: General Pedro Estrella rejects the Turk after learning he was one of Trujillo's assassins. López-Calvo, Ignacio (2005), "God and Trujillo": Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, ISBN 0-8130-2823-X .

Tropes present in the book:

The facts, perhaps, almost preclude it: even among Latin America's notoriously bad leaders Trujillo ranks among the worst.