JOURNAL CLUB: The Feast of the Goat Good books to not only enjoy when you are reading but then when we talk about them.
This immense pleasure, we had this Saturday in the Reading Club Library Torrente Ballester, a book that is pure literature: "The Feast of the Goat" by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Fiction and history come together in this novel by Peruvian writer to let us know, from fiction, some of the features of the dictatorships of our century, represented here embodied by the figure of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, owner and master for over thirty years of the Dominican Republic.
The literary theme of the Central American dictatorships had not been exhausted as indisputable classics Tirano Banderas or Autumn of the Patriarch as not been exhausted, unfortunately, the social issue that drives them. Vargas Llosa, using the action of the return home of a United Nations official, recreates the sixties and the present time, the Trujillo dictatorship, the servility of those who are filled with mouth-to-coast home to empty food the mouths of his countrymen.
The novel follows three interwoven storylines. The first concerns a woman, Urania Cabral, who is back in the Dominican Republic, after a long absence to visit his ailing father, and ends by recalling the incidents of his youth and revealing an ancient secret to his aunt and cousins. The second story focuses on the last day in the life of Trujillo from the moment you wake up on, and shows us the inner circle of the regime, Urania's father once belonged. L to third story describes the murderers of Trujillo, many of whom had been loyal to the government, while awaiting the President's car later that night. After the assassination, this story shows us the pursuit of the murderers. Every aspect of the plot of the book shows a different view on the Dominican Republic for its political and social environment, past and present.
The various characters that alternate and intertwine in the novel, from within and pilloried dictator, to the captains of the army who tend the trap that leads (leads) to death are shown with the research skills of a journalist, the narrative tricks of Alfred Hitchcock and the wisdom literature of a great teacher. Exciting, on, a docudrama written in words that are history now, almost black in the English American novel at times. And many times the story provides a better case for the narrative that the deformation aware that pure fiction can provide, we like or we panic.
The novel p Osee something you should not miss any good novel: the growing interest in the plot. It is what is known as "the paradox of the reader 'will, at a time, reaching the end proposed to find out the secret, but feared that time arrives, the book ends, and he runs the tense pleasure triggers curiosity.
The author manages to keep readers' interest through a narrative procedure that is to unfold the story and place it in different perspectives arising from different time points also.
A major London newspaper, wondered if "The Feast of the Goat" by Mario Vargas Llosa is the best novel of the twentieth century. You may respond effectively if it is. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the other possible best novel - finished reading, he said something very significant: "this is not done on an old man like me." There was, of course, angry. He was frank admiration.