The Feast of the Goat Summary

The Feast of the Goat Overview

The Feast of the Goat tells the story of the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Falling in a long line of Latin American dictator novels that blend history and fiction, the novel takes shape partly as the memories of Urania Cabral, who returns to the see her father 35 years after the assassination, and partly as the first-person experience of the central historical characters, including the dictator himself. With painstaking realism, it documents the brutality and particularly the sexual violence of Trujillo's regime. In attempting to understand how humans can create such tyranny and evil, the novel at the same times touches on themes of trauma, history, freedom, and gender.