SOURCE: Menton, Seymour. Review of La fiesta del chivo, by Mario Vargas Llosa. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 676.

In the following review, Menton offers praise for Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo, ranking it among the author's four best novels.

The publication of still another high-quality novel in the postrevolutionary era (1989-) may encourage some cultural-studies devotees to reconsider their hostility toward “elite literature.” Along with Carlos Fuentes, Abel Posse, Sergio Ramírez, Julio Escoto, and many others who have published outstanding works in the past decade, Mario Vargas Llosa has, with his latest effort, written a fascinating, well-documented novel based on Latin American history. Unlike Carpentier's Recurso del método, García Márquez's Otofio del patriarca, and several other novels that create a multinational synthesis of the archetypal dictator, La fiesta del chivo deals specifically and realistically with perhaps the most tyrannical of all Latin American...