Sex, politics, and high art

Gene H. Bell-Villada

pp. 139-157

in: Juan E. De Castro, Nicholas Birns (eds), Vargas Llosa and Latin American politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

The launching of Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000) in Spain unleashed something of a cultural whirlwind. Indeed, the coming-out of the Goat may well become a legend in the annals of book publishing, comparable to that we associate with, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The initial print run of ten thousand copies sold out in a day. In Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, The Feast of the Goat was presented at the Hotel Jaragua (the place where the character Urania Cabral stays and the setting for her first and final scenes) before an audience of a thousand (Armas Marcelo 443). A local supermarket chain called La Cadena ran full-page ads offering a free bottle of wine with each purchase of The Feast of the Goat (Gewecke 152). Meanwhile some high-placed Dominicans, feeling unfairly singled out as Trujillistas in the novel, protested angrily about the alleged literary injustice done them.