The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.
When the Colombian magazine Semana surveyed 81 experts to pick the 100 best novels in Spanish during the last 25 years, The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa’s gripping account of a political cult of personality run amok, finished in second place. Only Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera ranked higher.
Even so, this novelistic treatment of the murderous regime of Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo is relatively unknown in the United States. A quick check of Amazon shows that Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel doesn’t rank among the top 100,000 sellers. In contrast, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—which also deals with the Trujillo regime, although more cursorily—sits in the top one hundred. Fortunately readers don’t need to choose between the two: the Republic of Readers (unlike the Trujillo’s Dominican Republic) has room for many diverse and contrary voices, and both these novels are well worth reading.
I suspect that Díaz felt some heat from Vargas Llosa’s achievement. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao took 11 years to write, and in the middle of this effort Díaz saw the Peruvian novelist publish The Feast of the Goat, which masterfully covered the same territory Díaz hoped to stake out for himself. I am not sure if this added to Díaz’s writer's block, or spurred him to finish his long-lingering work-in-progress. In any event, Díaz resorted to the strange expedient of trying to critique Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel in the footnotes to his own work of fiction.
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