The Feast of the Goat - Part I

I’ve been trying to go into these dictator novels with a generally open mind, however, I do go into them with some expectations. For example, I expect them to require a lot of concentration and a great deal of resolve and determination to get to the end. That said, I’m finding Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat to be much more laid back then any of the previous novels that we’ve read so far in class. And I’m finding myself actually drawn into the book; I actually care about the characters in a different way than I did about the ones in the other books. When I was at work the other day, I even found myself wondering, for instance, “What’s going to happen to Amadito in the end?”

I really enjoy the way the author tells his story. Maybe I’ve just been watching too much Lost, but I like his use of flashbacks to explore the personalities and motivations of the characters. All the characters, however, seem to be trapped in the past always looking there for their answers. The conspirators were all former diehard Trujillistas, whom at some point in their lives ceased to be because they and/or their families were brutalized by Trujillo and his regime. Urania returns to the Dominican Republic from a thirty-five year, self-imposed exile in the United States where she has obsessed over information and writing from the Trujillo era, and once there, she ruminates over memories of her father, and through her memories, we are introduced to Cabral’s own flashbacks. Trujillo himself, who occupies the centre of everyone’s memories in some form or another, dwells just as much if not more on the past; although, more than any other character, he looks toward the future, ironically enough.

All in all, I’m enjoying this book very much, it definitely is the Clive Cussler novel of the bunch, and I can’t wait to see how it ends.

The General in His Labyrinth - Part II

For the second half of The General in His Labyrinth, it was definitely a downer, and I feel compelled to ask, as did someone in our class (can’t remember who, sorry) said: “Do any of these books have a happy ending?” Although, I kind of had a feeling that the General wasn’t going to be the recipient of any kind of magical cure for his terminal illness, it was still very depressing to read of his gradual demise and eventual death throughout the book. Even so, I thought that Garcia Marquez did a very good job of making the General’s condition gradually deteriorate, especially when considering that the author started at the very end of Simon Bolivar’s life to begin with. And, I really got the sense of how strong the General really was – he wanted to hang on, he wanted to continue to help solve all the problems that were plaguing, and even threatening to destroy his vision of a free and united continent, and yet his very own body was betraying him, stopping him from accomplishing all the things that he felt he still needed to do.

I thought Garcia Marquez did an excellent job just describing death in general. One passage near the end of the book, on page 260, particularly stood out to me: “Then he had the room sprinkled with more cologne than ever, and he continued to take the illusory baths, to shave with his own hand, to clean his teeth with fierce savagery in a superhuman effort to defend himself against the obscene filth of death.” Just the entire aura of death in these last few pages and yet the General is still trying to live and to do things like brush his teeth and shave, even though there is no apparent purpose in the act, but to try and defy death.

The General in His Labyrinth - Part I

The General in His Labyrinth turned out to be quite a nice read, so to speak, coming directly out of a book like I, the Supreme. It has characters! It has chapters (sort of)! It’s only a little more than 250 pages! García Márquez is very talented in drawing out the very tail end of the life of Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator, with every page and paragraph meticulously sculpted by the author to create a poignant image of the General as he goes on his final journey. Right from the first page and continuing on into every page, is a carefully created dichotomy and contrast of the General’s person. He is simultaneously weak and strong at the same time. While he suffers terribly from tuberculosis (I felt compelled to look it up because I was becoming very frustrated with the General’s refusal of doctors, and because I just really wanted to get a more precise image in my head of what was really going on with him. Oh, and I looked it up on Wikipedia no less, so I know it must be right!) and bears all of the disease’s symptoms: fever, coughing, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite, etc… Yet, he is mentally alert, his will is tremendously strong, and he does all that is in his power to retain every last scrap of his dignity.

In the last three novels that we have read in class, all of the dictators we have encountered have turned out to be very much the same, and the authors have all done very good jobs of making me despise them. So, I was understandably surprised when I found myself actually liking, and even at times admiring, the General. García Márquez has made a larger than life figure like Simon Bolivar into a very tangible, very human character. He has his faults: he gets angry, he shouts, he throws a temper tantrum when he loses a card game. And he has his strengths: he’s an excellent tactician and a seemingly loyal friend who inspires such loyalty in others around him, and he’s very persevering when it comes to accomplishing any kind of goal, which is probably what allowed him to achieve so much in what seems like such a short amount of time. Overall, I’m finding that he’s a much more enjoyable “dicator” to hang around than El Supremo was. And on that note as well, he seems to throw into question what exactly defines a dictator.

I, the Supreme - Fin

I have to say, after my initial difficulties with the first half of I, the Supreme I found the second half of the book to be somewhat easier to read for some inexplicable reason – maybe I just became more familiar with the tone, style, and diction it was written in, or Roa Bastos just got lazy. Personally, I think the former is much more likely. That aside, I really came to love the style that the “novel” was written in (dictations to Patino and private journal entries by El Supremo) as it seemed to be the best way to accomplish Roa Bastos’s goal of getting as close as possible to El Supremo, even allowing his readers to seemingly slip inside the dark crevices of the man’s psyche. At many times the book had a surreal quality to it as though one was experiencing a sort of hallucination (i.e. El Supremo’s numerous conversations with his dead dog, Sultan), and at other times, it was almost unclear what exactly was happening, as though you were reading a diary of a madman even when an event was taking place, such as when El Supremo accidentally set fire to his study at the end of the book (by the way, was I the only one wondering how he was writing all of that down while the fire was raging?).

The moment that had the most impact on me was Patino taking dictation for his own death sentence from El Supremo (especially after he had just spent the last page or two praising El Supremo to the skies). That scene for me, was much like watching a horror movie. You know the one, where you’re almost yelling at one of the characters to stop doing something enormously stupid, like walking down into the basement with no weapons and without bothering to turn on the light, while all the while calling out “Is anybody there?” when they know perfectly well that there’s a serial killer on the loose whose been targeting his/her circle of friends and killing them one by one in various, gruesome ways. My immediate reaction was much like that, I felt like yelling at Patino to just stop taking the dictation. Just stop. Just put down the pen, turn around, and walk out the door. After though, when I thought back to this scene, I realised the significance of it. El Supremo’s control over everything was so absolute that Patino could not refuse; in fact, he acted like the idea of disobeying was nonexistent. However, the message was that El Supremo needed Patino in order to communicate his will. Without Patino, or without someone to take his dictation, he was just a sick, dying old man – not El Supremo.

I, the Supreme at Last

When I first cracked open Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme I had certain expectations about the book, especially since is supposed to be the “best” in the group of five dictator novels that we will be reading for this class. However, it did not exceed or come to be lower than my expectations since it was nothing like what I expected it to be. I was first caught off guard by the style it was written in. Firstly, there are no chapters, just four hundred pages of a dictator dictating to his secretary. And secondly, usually there are two characters speaking: El Supremo, or Dr. Francia, and his secretary, Patino who takes dictation from El Supremo in every sense of the word, but their dialogue makes no use of quotation marks. So, at first it was a bit difficult to distinguish which of them was speaking, but after a page or two it became apparent and easier to tell, as El Supremo’s dialogue is commanding and authoritative, whereas Patino always uses “Your Excellency” and other such titles when he speaks to El Supremo. Likewise his language is usually very sycophantic, and very fanciful – especially when he is regaling El Supremo with some story or event (which all seem like events from a science fiction or fantasy novel).

The mysterious “third character” in I the Supreme, the Compiler, is also interesting because of the notes that he leaves. In them he comments on things that El Supremo or Patino has said, almost acting as an authority as he denounces or calls into question some passages. Perhaps he is the most supreme presence in the novel as he also, it seems, decides what will and what will not be included in the book as well as being able to influence the reader’s perception.

Farewell El Señor Presidente

The end of El Señor Presidente left me feeling cold. We had witnessed the “hero” of the novel, Miguel Angel Face, undergo a metamorphosis from being a seemingly cruel man, no better than The President himself, into a person of conscience. Asturias seemed to let us hope, at one point, that there was hope for Miguel Angel and his wife, Camila, that they would be able to escape from the complete and total prison that The President has created – a prison that is not only physical, but psychological as well. There was also the hope that Camila’s father, General Eusebio Canales, would create and lead the insurrection that would topple The President’s regime of fear. However, both hopes were crushed as Miguel Angel Face was killed by a lie in the form of the spoken word and General Canales was killed by a lie in the form of the written word. Both of these lies originated from The President, hence the link between writing, words, and power.

At the same time, I found it difficult to find hope in Asturias’s novel. It seemed more to me to be a reflection and analysis of the vicious, cyclical nature of The President’s reign of oppression. At the end of the book it was as though everything that I had read had no overall effect, it was as though none of it had ever taken place in the world that El Señor Presidente is set in; because at the end of the novel nothing had really changed at all. However, perhaps Asturias is saying that [I]real[/I] change cannot come about all at once, because some change did occur – Camila and her son Miguel did manage to break out of the cycle by moving out of the city and into the countryside, and Angel Face’s name does live on through his son. So perhaps little by little others will manage to break out of the circle as well.

Angel Face’s transformation from a man into a bestial creature was very depressing to read, especially after having watched his transformation via his love for Camila, although it was beautifully written (as was the whole novel).