The Feast of the Goat

Urania Cabral returns to Santo Domingo in 1996 after decades away, and Mario Vargas Llosa builds the novel around what brought her back: her dying father, Agustín Cabral, once a minister in Rafael Trujillo's government, and a memory she has never told anyone in her family. The novel runs three strands at once. One follows Urania through the days of her visit, circling her father's sickbed without yet saying what she came to say. A second sits inside the car with the small group of conspirators waiting on the road outside Santo Domingo on the night of May 30, 1961, for Trujillo's car to pass, a sequence Vargas Llosa stretches out until the waiting itself becomes almost unbearable to read. A third follows Trujillo through what turns out to be his last day, an old man managing his own declining body, his incontinence, his failing potency, even as he still runs the country by fear alone.

The three strands converge on the assassination and on what happens to the conspirators afterward, most of them hunted down and killed in the regime's dying convulsions before Trujillo's son can be driven from power. But the novel's real revelation belongs to Urania. Confronting her father at last, she tells her family what he arranged when she was fourteen: that he handed her over to Trujillo himself, a private violation behind the public terror the rest of the book has been describing, and the reason she left the country and never came back until now.

Vargas Llosa treats power here as something that works on a body as directly as it works on a nation, intimate, sexual and bureaucratic all at once, and the novel suits a reader willing to sit inside genuine dread, both the conspirators' and Urania's, without much relief along the way. It rewards attention to how the three timelines answer each other, since the full weight of any one of them only lands once you have the other two.