A version that edited some of the more minor characters would've worked better for me.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 09:04:35 Boxid IA40173610 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Sometimes, I just had to skip ahead to get through it. I could barely manage to get through those parts. The author lingered on long passages and chapters that described in great detail the terrible tortures and deaths endured by the dictator's enemies and assassins. I longed for an abbreviated and trimmed-down version for a gringo like me. On the other hand, I struggled with an overwhelming number of characters with long (often, to my ear, similar) names, especially in the cabinet, the military, and ultimately those who overthrew the government.

On the one hand, this is a fascinating story about a period of brutal dictatorship in the Dominican Republic of which I was completely ignorant.

I chose this book because I have very little knowledge of Central and South American or Caribbean history, so I've been reading a lot of historical fiction and authors from those regions. 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)Ī Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, 49-year-old Urania Cabral 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. In The Feast of the Goat, this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ( Bookforum ), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

The feast of the goat