One should generally take Mario Vargas Llosa’s books on their own merits. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, for example, is a happy sendup of the art of the telenovela and can be read as such even if the writer’s first wife thinks she was mistreated in his writing of it. Death in the Andes comes across as a respectful, even loving tribute to the people of the most remote Peruvian highlands, who live an age-old reality which we outsiders would call supernatural or (more unfairly) superstitious, and who in real life for decades had to endure the conflict between their traditions and the modern realities of Maoist terrorism and central government disinterest. That the author may have written Death in the Andes as part of an attempt to atone for his role in the investigation of the Uchuraccay massacre does not diminish the beauty of the work.
It is harder to read The Feast of the Goat without placing it into the political context of the times, though. The book was written in 2000, coincident with the Alberto Fujimori’s campaign for and inauguration to a third term as President of Peru. Mr. Vargas Llosa, who lost a runoff vote to the previously unknown Mr. Fujimori in 1990, was dismayed by that earlier outcome (as reportedly shown in A Fish in the Water, which I have not read). He feared Fujimori might be setting himself up as president-for-life, but Fujimori was no Trujillo. The main complaint about Fujimori, more than his ill-fated decision to run for a third term, involved his use of violence to put down the Sendero Luminoso and MRTA. What this criticism failed to note, however, was that he applied only as much force as needed to meet the country’s needs in each phase of the struggle; that Abimael Guzman was captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a peaceful life in prison, rather than summarily executed, should probably be seen as an indication of Fujimori’s respect for normal government institutions when they were free to operate under less than extreme circumstances.
The Feast of the Goat, then, reads like a morality play directed to the Peruvian people and pushed into print to meet a deadline imposed by the country’s election calendar. In it, it seems for most of the book like the heroes are supposed to be the fictionalized versions of the real-life gunmen who killed Trujillo, but the long descriptions of their motives feel more like Mr. Vargas Llosa grinding away at his research. Likewise, the character of Urania Cabral, who unlike the plotters appears not to be based on a historic individual, falls short of gaining our full sympathy. There must be more to this person than the description of her short, agonizing interaction with Trujillo, her c.v., and her antipathy toward her crippled father would indicate. But instead, in the end (literally and figuratively), the book’s most interesting character turns out to be Trujillo’s successor, Joaquin Balaguer. In this telling, Balaguer comes out of nowhere following Trujillo’s death to save the country from descending into a bloodbath, but in reality Balaguer served Trujillo faithfully for 30 years in many high offices, and then for 23 more years as an iron-fisted president himself. Perhaps, though, not all caudillos are born equal, but instead can be sorted by their political leanings, their particular brand of violence, or whether – like Balaguer – they can claim the title of poet and author.
Although my search has not been exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, I have looked at other reviews of The Feast of the Goat in hopes of finding a better analysis of Urania Cabral’s character than I can give. So far, I haven’t found what I was seeking, but for a good, short critique of how the events portrayed in the book fit into the arc of Dominican history, the reader could check out brothersjudd.com.
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