The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [1]
—Philip Herter, St. Petersburg Times
“The Feast of the Goat is a fascinating version of the last days of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, ‘the goat,’ the dictator who led the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. The great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa…largely succeeds on both fronts; as a thrilling page-turner and a documentation of historical record…. Another highlight in a magnificent career.”
—David Lida, San Antonio Express-News
“Compelling and controversial, La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat) is a ‘must read.’”
—Alberto Huerta, Hispanic Outlook
“According to Mario Vargas Llosa, good fiction makes people uneasy. By that standard, his Feast of the Goat is a masterpiece, both to the degree it is sure to make readers squirm and for the multitude of reasons it gives them to do so.”
—Steve Tomasula, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“With his tight and gripping storytelling technique—combined with the numerous historical detail—Vargas Llosa ensnares the reader completely within this novel, transforming a few personal stories into a panoramic and powerful reproduction of Latin American history and politics.”
—Kathleen Guico, Harvard Book Review
“Rivaling Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as one of the most disturbing fictional accounts of tyranny meeting its unexpected annihilation, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat is a fierce, brilliant account of the poorly orchestrated 1961 assassination of the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and its far-reaching repercussions.”
—Jeremy Spencer, The Memphis Flyer
“[Feast of the Goat] is nothing less than a head-on attack against the most inhumanly cruel and degrading kind of corrupt dictatorship…. The plot is fast moving, suspenseful, and gripping.”
—Donald L. Shaw, Latin American Literature and Arts
To Lourdes and José Israel Cuello,
and so many other Dominican friends
The people celebrate
and go all the way
for the Feast of the Goat
the Thirtieth of May.
—“They Killed the Goat”
A Dominican merengue
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
1
Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo—when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You’ll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzmán by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father’s idea too?
She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the remote line of the horizon, while here, at the shore, it breaks