![]() ![]() An official of the World Bank, she comes bearing a degree from Harvard Law School and the name of the Greek muse of astronomy, but the cold, Northern eye she trains on the land she left 35 years earlier conceals a heart filled with implacable rage. The book begins in the capital of Santo Domingo in 1996, with the arrival of an unforgiving judge of the nation's past, Urania Cabral, estranged daughter of General Rafael Trujillo's former secretary of state, Agustmn. Never has a novel drawn the malignant political potential of crude, unfettered masculinity more ferociously. For Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist with political inclinations (he made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency of his homeland in 1990, losing to the the would-be tyrant Alberto Fujimori), the Latin American variety of dictatorship is the manifestation of a hallowed cultural institution: machismo. ![]() Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel of the Dominican Republic's Trujillo regime, "The Feast of the Goat," reminds us that throughout most of history tyranny has worn an all too human face - and that it always shows us the dark aspect of our most prized qualities. ![]() Part of the horror of George Orwell's "1984" lay in its vision of rationalism and technology, the pride of European civilization, turned to the service of brutal authoritarianism. ![]()
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