The Feast of the Goat

The last day of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years, and the assassination that ends him, braided with the return of Urania Cabral to the city thirty-five years later to face what the regime did to her. The capital, then renamed Ciudad Trujillo, is mapped precisely: the National Palace, the seafront Malecón where the assassins wait, the torture cells of La Cuarenta, and the Mahogany House at San Cristóbal outside town where the Goat took the girls chosen for him.

Rafael Trujillo

The National Palace

The regime

The book opens inside the dictator's iron routine, the enemas and the impotence he hides, the terror he administers from the palace over an entire people. Vargas Llosa uses the ageing Goat's body and appetites to anatomise absolute power and the courtiers who feed it.

Trujillo's chapters

explicit Trujillo governs from the National Palace in Santo Domingo, the real seat of Dominican government, from which the novel reconstructs the machinery of his thirty-one-year rule.

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