PositiveThe GuardianThis is an ambitious novel, as sure-footed as it is graphic in integrating the private aspects of daily life in the Trujillo years with the public, or hypothetical motives with real events. Of all the Spanish American novelists I've read, Vargas Llosa is far and away the most convinced and accomplished realist; and he's at his strongest in The Feast of the Goat … The Feast of the Goat comes closer than is altogether pleasant to conveying what it would be like to have your conditions of life determined by the whims of an erratic and vainglorious thug like Trujillo.