Feast of the Goat

So there's been a little very small break in my writing. Not that I haven't read things. Just a usual lapse in outward energy.

I read this book by Mario Vargas Llosa recently, on a whim, having bought it while idling away five minutes of pre-ferry time at a bookstore at Bowling Green. It's a novel in the context of Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and impressively weaves together the lives of several people, including Trujillo, his assassins, and a Dominican-American whom he molested in her youth.

The stories are mostly disturbing, though some funny, and aim to understand how people succumb to obeying dictatorship, and its indignity, and also when they rebel. The seventy year old Trujillo is represented as lording over a fiefdom, playing with and manipulating his overloyal servants, taking their women as a proxy for governing, and justifying every continuing repression with the need to ward off a landing of the Marines (given Central American history, it’s an ironic element). It's very straightforward, but the insight is tremendous, very imaginative and showed me a lot about the country. And the multitude of lives involved makes it compelling.

So an example – there is a plot to assassinate His Excellency, and the chief general, Pupo Roman, is convinced to join it, though his conditions are such that he only acts once Trujillo is actually dead. It finally happens, and the general, though continually insulted by Trujillo in life and dreaming of revenge, freezes in absence of the habitual subordination. He lets the secret police run wild, eventually capture and torture him. He is still unsure why he’s doing what he’s doing. When on the verge of a prolonged death (months! Vargas Llosa does not skip the details, and I’m not sure how I feel about it) in the torture chamber, he fully assumes the role of dissident victim and dies almost fulfilled. Why? “’For love of my country,’ he [Roman] heard himself saying.” Yet one doubts he knows what he means.

Roman as a character represents really well the difficulty of making political and/or moral choices, at the right time, when one’s life order is at stake. He has no personal, internal, value system and this makes making a personally-significant political choice difficult. Then there is the (arguably) main character Urania Cabral. She makes her choice early on, leaving the country at fourteen for the US to escape memories of how her father, a minister disgraced with a Kafkaesque lack of explanation, sacrifices her to the Chief as a plea for forgiveness. Yet while studying at Harvard and working at the World Bank, she indulges an under-the-skin interest in reading Dominican history and can’t shake off her solitude. She possesses a very developed value system, but the circumstances of her life have made it extremely convoluted, and this warps her behavior. This makes you wonder to what extent a rigorous internal order is helpful in living at all.
I’ve gotten lost in my own analysis at this point. But these sorts of contradictions pervade the book, and the interesting characters coupled with a well-created reality make for a satisfying read. Plus now I know a lot about torture…