Comparing Vargas Llosa with Garcia Marquez and others

Started Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000) yesterday and am finding it a great relief after my aborted slog through The Sleepwalkers - V-L's novel is one among many overtly politico-historical novels, in this case taking on the issue of the tyranny in The Dominican Republic under dictator Trujillo. I wish I knew more about the historical facts behind this novel, but am accepting that the historical architecture is largely or even entirely true. Feast of the Goat has several converging narrative lines: a Dominican woman whose father was a Trujillo henchman returns to the DR after many years to visit her now-invalid, elderly father - this section is a way in which VL brings the novel into present history, as the woman, Urania, is amazed by the growth and development in her native land; also, Trujillo and his entourage are major characters, in sections set in about 1960 as Trujillo worries about plots against him and about potential invasions from Cuba or the U.S. (and of course the U.S. Marines did invade at some point - not sure exactly how or if that will tie into the events of this novel); and the third strand is a member Trujillo's elite who is apparently forced to break off an engagement and kill his would-have-been brother-in-law as part of his initiation into the inner circle - an act that so disturbs him that he joins a plot against Trujillo's life. V-L is often compared with Gabriel Gracia Marquez, and with good reason as they are, along with Fuentes, the titans of late-20th-century Latin American literature. Vargas Llosa differs from G-M, however, in that he has not interest in magic realism, much less the experiments in form, that characters so much of the great Latin American works, from Borges through Cortazar to GM to Bolano - a great tradition, from which Vargas Llosa steps aside, perhaps with a little bit of scorn. Both he and Garcia Marques take on overtly political themes - and what Latin American writer would not be drawn to the theme of dictatorships and abuse of power? But where G-M has been particularly interested in examining the inner life of a tyrant (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, e.g.), V L is interested in actions and their effects - oddly, he's more the journalist than G M, who was in fact a journalist at the start of his career. Obviously, V L is the more politically conservative - though staunchly opposed to the oligarchy of Trujillo, in this novel, where he never shuns from depicting the most horrific abuse of power (oddly foretelling the horrors of Sadam Hussein in the next century), he does not seem particularly interested in the lives of the working class or the rural peasants and Indians, as is G M. Here, V L is more like Fuentes - diplomatic, austere, a world-class intellectual rather than a street poet or a brawler. And of course, as Fuentes was a diplomat, Vargas Llosa entered political life for a time - running a conservative, and therefore doomed, campaign for the presidency of Peru, if I remember correctly.