SOURCE: Howard, Gregory. Review of The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 1 (spring 2002): 120-21.

In the following review, Howard describes The Feast of the Goat as “a visceral lesson in the complex synergy of political intrigue, sex, machismo, and history.”

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. Set in the Dominican Republic, this triple-plotted novel is at once a fictionalized character study of Rafael “The Goat” Trujillo, the dictator who once ruled that island; of the cell of men who ended his reign by assassination; and of one individual, Urania Cabral, the daughter of a senator who proves his loyalty to the regime by...