SOURCE: Bell-Villada, Gene H. “Thirty-One Years of Solitude.” Commonweal 128, no. 19 (9 November 2001): 20-1.

In the following review, Bell-Villada asserts that The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa's chronicle of the tyrannical reign of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo as leader of the Dominican Republic, “will most surely become the book about the long Trujillo nightmare and the ongoing, sordid aftermath.”

“The Goat” was one of the popular, clandestine nicknames of Rafael Leónidas 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 will most surely become the book about the long Trujillo nightmare and the ongoing, sordid aftermath. It joins the ranks of other now-classic novels—such as Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the...