The Unholy One, or The Feast of the Goat

In the early 1970s, at a congress of Latin American writers, the idea arose to write a series of books "Fathers of the Nation" about dictators in Latin America. Many authors enthusiastically accepted the challenge, and it was within the framework of this project that García Márquez wrote his "Autumn of the Patriarch," portraying a composite image of a dictator, while Mario Vargas Llosa presented to the public his novel "The Unholy One, or The Feast of the Goat," dedicated to the infamous Dominican tyrant Trujillo, nicknamed for his monstrous lust the Goat.

Almost all the characters in "The Feast of the Goat" are real people: associates, victims, and assassins of Trujillo. Vargas Llosa collected a vast amount of documentary material before he started writing the novel, visited the Dominican Republic, questioned witnesses, and finally began his research novel, in which he attempted to answer the troubling question that haunted him: what is the magic of the paralyzing influence of a dictator's personality? What gaps in the souls of people does a tyrant fill, such that they not only submit docilely but also with delight to his inhumane orders?