The Feast of the Goat

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Vargas Llosa rightly accuses many Dominicans (especially those with some sort of power and authority) of acting reprehensibly in not trying to curb Trujillo's power, but he does a poor job of explaining -- or even wondering -- what led them to servilely and docilely follow and support their awful leader. This movie is a about the brutal reign of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, from 1930 up 1961 when he was assassinated. Rafael Trujillo was most definitely the "Devil" reincarnated. He was without a doubt a cruel psycho completely without decency or compassion for others. His specialty was to use his power to rape underage girls and degrade subordinates for petty reasons. Many of them would not dare protest. His subordinates followed him out of fear combined with greed that he may throw them a few crumbs as he robbed the economy of the Dominican Republic. Vargas Llosa, Mario (2001), The Feast of the Goat, New York: Picador, ISBN 0-312-42027-7 . Trans. Edith Grossman. A film version of the novel was released in 2005, starring Isabella Rossellini, Paul Freeman, and Tomas Milian. Jorge Alí Triana and his daughter, Veronica Triana, wrote a theatrical adaptation in 2003.

A political and historical novel about Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. This novel is a factually correct version of the events focused around his assassination in 1961 when Trujillo was 70 years old.Still, laborious as it seems in the beginning, this difficult structure pays off extremely well in the second half of the book (.....) What we are brought to see at the end of this novel is the ultimate horror of the Trujillo regime: Not so much that he raped people's daughters but that his power was so total and pervasive that he could get people to cooperate, voluntarily, in the raping of their own daughters." - Madison Smartt Bell, The Los Angeles Times I Cannot Self-Terminate: The Turk's strong religious beliefs prohibit him to even try suicide. Eventually he's executed along with his friends, something he receives gladly. Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt; The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho.

The Feast of the Goat is only the second of Vargas Llosa's novels to be set outside Peru (the first being The War of the End of the World). It is also unusual because it's the first to have a female protagonist: as critic Lynn Walford writes of the leading character in The Feast of the Goat, and also Vargas Llosa's subsequent book The Way to Paradise, "both are utterly unlike any of the other female characters in his previous novels". [3] Rafael Trujillo, known also as The Goat, The Chief, and The Benefactor, is a fictionalized character based on the real dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and the official President of the Republic from 1930 to 1938 and 1943 to 1952. [12] In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa imagines the innermost thoughts of the dictator, and retells the Goat's last hours from his own perspective. [13] For Antonio de la Maza: the murder of his brother Tavito - a loyal Trujillist - as part of a coverup.My apartment in Manhattan is full of books. . . . Like this house when I was a girl. Law, economy, history. But in my bedroom, only Dominican books. Testimonies, essays, memoirs, lots of histories. Can you guess the period? The Trujillo Era, what else? The most important thing that happened to us in five hundred years. You used to say that with so much conviction. It's true, Papa. During those thirty-one years, all the evil we had carried with us since the Conquest became crystallized. You're in some of those books, an important figure. Minister of Foreign Affairs, senator, president of the Dominican Party. Is there anything you weren't, Papa? I've become an expert on Trujillo. Instead of playing bridge or golf, or riding horses, or going to the opera, my hobby has been finding out what happened during those years. It's a shame we can't have a conversation. You could clarify so many things for me, you lived them arm in arm with your beloved Chief, who repaid your loyalty so shabbily."