2000
(Spanish title: La fiesta del chivo)
Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read
This was one of the toughest books I ever read. The descriptions of the
torture are quite vivid and detailed. I wouldn't recommend it to someone
who has a weak heart.
Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the
Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Of course,
I had heard about the dictatorship and recently read "In the Time of the Butterflies"
by Julia Alvarez, so I should have been forewarned enough. But I
wasn't. The way, this dictator ruined almost everybody's life and what
people can do to other human beings, it's just unbelievable.
The
story is told by Trujillo himself, by Urania Cabral who is the daughter
of one of his followers, and by his assassinators taking turns and
making the story even more suspenseful than it is already. We see the
different points of view - not that it makes us understand the dictator
any better, I wouldn't want to anyway. Supposedly, he loved his country
and its people but how can you treat someone like that if you love them.
It
is unbelievable how the author managed to put this remarkable story on
paper, I guess you have to be a Nobel Prize winning writer for that.
Comment from one of our book club members.
"This
book provides wonderful insights into Rafael Trujillo, once dictator of
the Dominican Republic. The reader can see his strength, his
discipline, his idealism and the corruption of all that into a hideous
corrosive force degrading himself, his collaborators and the innocent
alike. The writing and storytelling are compelling. This is the best
book I have read in a long time."
She is right. Unfortunately, her description fits many dictators.
Another comment:
"Reading
the book started out quite slow for me, because of the different time
and point of view changes, but after about half the book I could not put
it down again until I finished it. It was really horrifying and
revealing about history and places I had no idea about. And I dont
understand at all how people can be so evil, cruel, manipulative. I
absolutely also can recommend this book!"
I totally agree. It is unbelievable what people can do to each other.
"One
of the most valuable things about this superb piece of literature is
that it gives us a close-up, vivid, and personal view, partly factual
and partly imagined, of the perpetrators of gross injustice so we can
begin to understand how people can be so evil, cruel and manipulative.
It worked for me."
We read this in our international online book club in August 2022.
Book Description:
"
Haunted
all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-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
people. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans
call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence
and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have
become the way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping away. There is a
conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway
that will have bloody consequences of its own. In 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."
Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Mario Vargas Llosa received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1996.
Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.
Original Post on "Let's Read".
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