The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat, written by Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, is a work of historical fiction originally published in Spanish in 2000 and translated into English by Edith Grossman in 2001. The novel chronicles the final days of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship over the Dominican Republic from three points of view: through the eyes of his assassins in 1961, from the time they wait to ambush him until their final moments; through Trujillo’s own eyes, from the morning of his last day until his assassination that evening; and in the 1990s, through the eyes of fictional character Urania Cabral, who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time since leaving just before Trujillo’s assassination. Vargas Llosa fictionalizes the lives and experiences of real people while simultaneously basing fictional characters’ experiences on actual or commonly reported events.

Plot Summary

Urania Cabral returns to the Dominican Republic in 1996 after her father, a former official in the Trujillo government, falls ill. She broke off contact with her Dominican relatives when she left for a Catholic school in the United States, at age 14, in 1961. She graduated from Harvard Law and currently works as a lawyer for the World Bank, spending her time exercising, working, and reading about the Trujillo Era.