Rating  - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
This book is amazing!! It truly took my breath away, so very vivid with much accurate historical data intertwined, I cannot fully express my pleasure as I read this book. I actually wanted it to continue. I believe Mr. Junot Diaz to be a wonderfully talented author and I can't wait for his next book. I would recommend this book to one and all who truly enjoy fantastic literature.
Rating - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
In this novel Junot Diaz reviews the recent history of the Dominican Republic while telling the story of a luckless American whose family is from the Domincan Republic and who suffers from the fukú, a curse passed down through generations and afflicting terrible harm on its victims. The narrator, a love-crazed logophile, tries to help Oscar develop from nerd to alpha man with very little success while pursuing his own career as writer and lover and telling the brutal and desperate story of life during Trujillo's dictatorship. To the narrator's ongoing frustration, the sci-fi addicted Oscar stubbornly chooses to find his own way through life, and it is often an unhappy one, although he manages to make a living and find some happiness as a teacher and writer and sometime developer of games. When he finally falls in love, he does so fatally but heroically in the face of post-Trujillo brutality.
I really liked this book. The narrator's delight with his own story-telling abilities and his high-speed take on language and culture make the reading a pleasure even when the events described are horrifying. I learned some things about Dominican history along the way, and Oscar, a decent guy though also a loser who refuses to stop being a loser, is a sympathetic character because he also never stops being himself. It's really a book about integrity and its consequences and about writing as zafa, the antidote to the curse and the means to move beyond it.
Rating - The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
Set in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey and spanning the last half of the 20th century this book follows the life of a family caught in the web of Dominican politics. A moving and compelling story beautifully written.
Rating  - This won a Pulitzer?
Just finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and here are some quick thoughts:
- Diaz's writing gives one a sense that he is more concerned about what other writers think of his work than what readers think. Every sentence and turn of phrase feels over-work shopped and over-edited as Diaz tries way too hard to be clever. When he is unable to decide on a single pop culture reference, he rattles off five. This makes for choppy narration and a story without flow.
- In addition to the multitude of pop-culture and science fiction references Diaz also includes as "gadgets" extensive footnotes and lots of Spanish/Spanglish. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but overall it's too much distraction. I often found myself having to reread chunks of the actual story because a page long footnote made me forget what was happening. And while I've read Tolkien, Watchmen and have seen the movie Akira, there were many references I did not get or did not find all that additive to the book. I also speak a decent amount of Spanish and yet found myself wondering if I was missing something important because I did not understand ~20% of the Spanish in the book. If you're going to include huge footnotes, consider throwing some translation in there, too.
- Putting my issues with style aside, the story itself presents some problems for me. The characters tend towards caricatures and Oscar in particular lacks depth. He's basically a Dominican version of the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons. The narrative is choppy (intentionally in some respects) but Diaz does not do enough to give us a sense of magnitude or structure at the beginning of the book. Not knowing where you're going in a story can be fine sometimes, but the problem here was I also did not care.
- Diaz's presence is also too strong at the end, where it is clear he had a hard time. Instead of choosing an ending, he basically gives us four, resulting in the dilution of all of them.
Maybe I'm too insular in my tastes just as the Nobel committee thinks many Americans are in their writing. But to think of this book and last year's winner, The Road, as being remotely on par with each other makes me cringe.
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Customer Reviews for Riverhead Hardcover,1594489580,9781594489587,1594489580,813.54 |
