From: Commonweal | Date: November 9, 2001| Author: Bell-Villada, Gene H. | COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

The Feast of the Goat 
Mario Vargas Llosa 
Translated by Edith Grossman 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 409 pp. 

The Goat" was one of the popular, clandestine nicknames of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the grotesque generalissimo who skillfully combined humiliation and terror, bribery and blood in tyrannizing the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961, when he was finally assassinated by a cadre of young army officers (with some U.S. help).

The Feast of the Goat w...