Thirty-One Years Of Solitude. - The Feast of the Goat - book review

The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Edith Grossman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 409 pp.

The Goat" was one of the popular, clandestine nicknames of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the grotesque generalissimo who skillfully combined humiliation and terror, bribery and blood in tyrannizing the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961, when he was finally assassinated by a cadre of young army officers (with some U.S. help).

The Feast of the Goat will most surely become the book about the long Trujillo nightmare and the ongoing, sordid aftermath. It joins the ranks of other now-classic novels--such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Tomas Eloy Martinez's diptych dealing with the Peron pair--that famously capture the oddities, myths, and ordinary horrors of life under a Latin military despot.

On a different note, the book miraculously restores Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to literary-master status. Over the last couple of decades Varga Llosa seemed in decline as he misdirected his talents toward an ill-fated campaign for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, and generally morphed into a cranky, libertarian publicist and right-wing scold. Meanwhile his novels lost their rigor and scope, and some, like Mayta (1984) and The Storyteller (1990), were downright sketchy. With this grand canvas, however, he recaptures the early greatness of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and The War of the End of the World (1981). It has been twenty years since Vargas Llosa came up with a novel this vivid and thrilling.

No review can do justice to the abundant details and intrigues, the relentless pace yet utter translucency of The Feast of the Goat, much of which is historically true. Four stories interconnect, flashing back and forward, Faulkner-style. Chief focus is on the seventy-year-old phenomenon Trujillo, his rituals, manias, and wiles. At his desk by 6 a.m., he works twenty hours a day, seven days a week. His attire is always impeccable (he's most bothered by Hitler's sartorial sloppiness). He doesn't sweat, he hardly sleeps. His fabled gaze can impale the proudest and most hardened of fighters. An evil genius at manipulation, he smooth-talks his enemies into serving him "for the good of the country" even as he ridicules them in public. An amoral gangster, he keeps thousands of thugs on the government payroll, patrolling the streets in black VW Beetles. His sole diversion is sex--bedding down young virgins, cuckolding his close subordinates, and then boasting of the exploits in banquet speeches. Trujillo and his loutish henchmen represent sadism elevated to ordinary social custom and system. The novel re-imagines "The Goat" in his final two weeks of life.

Waiting for Trujillo one night by the capital city's sea wall are a handful of aggrieved army men who've plotted his death. In these suspense-filled scenes we become acquainted with each of the dissidents, and learn of their personal histories and their bitterness at the Benefactor for his having thoroughly degraded their, and the citizenry's, lives.

The Goat is gunned down halfway through the book; what follows, however, is horrific beyond measure. Plans for a postassassination coup go awry, precisely as a result of the knee-jerk loyalties and demonic efficiency of the dictatorial machine. Readers should be warned of the wrenching, though never gratuitous, accounts of dehumanization and torture that take up some of these pages.

Equally sinister are the rise and triumph of Trujillo's figurehead president, Dr. Joaquin Balaguer, a creature so strange he could have been dreamt up by Garcia Marquez. Short, round-faced, with tiny hands, he is the phrasemaker and flatterer extraordinaire, a master of protocol and composure. Asexual, indifferent to wealth, and lacking in any military experience whatsoever, this cunningly mellifluous courtier nonetheless takes control, outwitting his most brutish rivals via a mix of honeyed words and shrewd alliances. In the end the regime doesn't die, it gets "civilized." (In real life, Balaguer would remain in power until the 1990s, completely blind yet as foxy as ever. Now, through Vargas Llosa's pen, he becomes a memorable character in literature.)

Framing the entire novel is its only presumably fictive matter, the personal odyssey of Urania Cabral, an attractive, forty-nine-year-old Manhattan lawyer-spinster who, at age fourteen, was hastily sent off for study in the United States, far from the Goat's mad whims. Now, in 1997, she returns for a visit to her relatives and her paralyzed, mute father, an erstwhile, earnest Trujillo ally and senator. These homey chapters provide the book's few glimpses of family warmth and humane feeling. Yet here too Trujillo's destructive whims had once intruded, and Urania's macabre reminiscences (which obviously one shouldn't divulge here) will build up to a chilling surprise, a flashback ending followed by a complex and equally surprising coda.

Vargas Llosa, a master of counterpoint, weaves these diverse voices into a narrative fugue that moves full speed ahead through crescendo and climax. As befits a historical thriller, the book is replete with period information. Readers will learn truckloads about what Trujillo did to his own people, about the terrible traumas that didn't heal--and in the bargain they will be gripped by a superb page-turner. Moreover, like many novels about tyranny, the insights gleaned from The Feast of the Goat apply to everyday "politics" in the widest sense. Some of the palace intrigues depicted here are perfectly conceivable in our corporate or academic corridors. Balaguer's florid pat phrases, smiling threats, and faux-pious grieving will ring familiar to anyone who has endured manipulative kin, colleague, or boss.

The book is nicely translated by Edith Grossman, although the dialogue portions could be more oral and colloquial, more "I've got" than "I have." At times her rendering of military dirty-talk misses the mark ("You have a lot of balls"--instead of simply "You've got balls"). Also, the Spanish adjective genial is not our English "genial," but rather indicates a work or action that is "of genius." Still, Grossman has done a remarkable job, and American readers have every reason to feel grateful for her monumental labors.

Gene H. Bell-Villada teaches Spanish at Williams College, and is the author of books on Borges and Garcia Marquez. His latest work of fiction is The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella & 13 Stories (Amador).

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