Vargas Llosa has characterised himself as a ‘novelist intoxicated by reality, fascinated by the history being forged around us and by the past which still weighs so heavily upon the present’. This is an instructive description of the author of The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del Chivo, 2000), a realist novel depicting historical events: the assassination in 1961 of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina and the legacy of his regime, which was still very evident in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s,when some of its scenes are set.

Trujillo, known as ‘el Chivo’, both owing to his reputation as an indefatigable stud and because of the word's association with the Devil, ruled that country in person or by proxy from 1930 until his death. He was one of the most cynical, sanguinary and absurdly histrionic of twentieth-century dictators, creating a police state, terrorising his subjects through a network of thugs and informers, and accumulating political, legal, military and economic power that turned the Dominican Republic into his and his grasping family's private fiefdom. Even more sinister was the control his propaganda machine and cult of personality enabled this lethal megalomaniac to exert over the minds of his subjects. Trujillo was the creature of the USA, trained by the Marines and ruling with the support of successive administrations in Washington, which he was careful to cultivate by presenting himself as a bulwark against communism while bankrolling American politicians and opinion-formers.