Description:
This essay analyses the Fiesta del Chivo (The fiesta of the Goat) in the light of other historical narrations of the Trujillo Period and LatinamericasÕ strong-arm men. It also reads the novel in the context of Vargas LlosaÕs own narrative traits as he re-reads history, in this case, achieving a notable parity between his own imaginative spirit and documental accuracy. This novel, that relates the last years of the dictatorship of the Dominican general Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961), reveals a hybrid quality, half historical novel and fictional journalism, and half kitsch melodrama, and together with La utopa arcaica, has become a cultural phenomena, almost converting itself in another episode of the same historical fable that it sets out to tell; but one that should not be read as a blind story about the impossibility of culture and democratic civilization in a Latin America diseased with voluntary servitude and dependent, in the political and cultural spheres, on dictators, caudillos, drug barons, despots and tyrants.