SOURCE: Torch, Rafael. Review of The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Antioch Review 60, no. 2 (spring 2002): 342-43.

In the following review, Torch identifies The Feast of the Goat as “a reminder of the struggle that still exists in and out of the Latin American Hemisphere.”

Full of the tremendous power of the Latin American epic, Vargas Llosa once again delivers a sweeping statement about the turbulent history of Latin America [in The Feast of the Goat]. Here he explores the final days, in 1961, of the dictator Rafael Trujillo's 31-year regime in the Dominican Republic, and the people he had deceived most, his citizens, who regarded him with the eyes of worshippers. “It was God and then Trujillo.”

The ruler, seventy in the beginning of the book, is a man terrified of old age, more prone to prove his twisted sense of manhood than ever before. Trujillo's...