I like the word “feast.” The sound of it, the upper teeth touching the lower lip. I like when it is used in titles of things. I want it when it comes like this.
Mario Vargas Llosa was one of the first writers I knew their names and work, back in 2011 when I was beginning to take interest in literature, Googling writers and books. Here’s a story about him that stuck with me: In 1976, five years after publishing his doctoral thesis titled Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Story of a Deicide, Llosa punched his friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City, and their friendship died. Another story: in 1990, he ran for president in Peru and lost. And the story most people know: he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Still one of my favourite citations.
So Saturday night, while reading Junot Diaz’ novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I stumbled upon this accusing clause, in one of that book’s many in-text notes:
Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat.
The person in question, Joaquin Balaguer, was racist to Black people, an apologist of the Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo’s genocide against Haitians, and ruled the Dominican Republic thrice, unleashing “a wave of violence…death-squading hundreds.”
I am fascinated by book titles, movie titles, song and album titles, find them inspirational, and back then in 2011, The Feast of the Goat, triumphantly titled, was the only one by Llosa that I liked. Back then when I had no access to books of that kind.
So Saturday night, I asked Google and received a copy of The Feast of the Goat. And with it a Book Excitement I don’t always feel these days. It is told from three perspectives: a woman’s, the Dominican Republic dictator’s, and the Dominican Republic dictator’s assassins. The sentences strike me, his articulation of things I want to write but presume might be uninteresting, his flourishing of things I want to write but haven’t found the vocabulary for. Or haven’t bothered to. In a way, I feel a kinship with his words here.
By the way, I really like, maybe even love, all the covers of the book that I’ve seen.
Image from joydelire.wordpress.com.
