All long-term dictators are alike: all short-term dictators vanish in their own short way. This at least is the assumption of many writers and readers, and in Latin America it amounts to something like a political faith. Of course there is nothing peculiarly Latin American about dictators of any kind; but Latin Americans often believe, with feelings ranging from outrage to fascination to resignation and back, that their culture has a special ability to beget and abet these creatures, so that they look at them - or at pictures of them - with the stubborn, unavertable gaze of someone looking into a magic mirror. Hence the tradition of dictator novels, a minor genre with major members: Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme (1974), Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974), Gabriel García Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and now Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000). The time lag is probably significant, since the latest book is the most literal and least hypnotised of the four. This is a virtue, but not entirely a virtue.

LRB 9 May 2002 | PDF Download