The Book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
The Story: Oscar is this way-overweight, way-nerdy kid living in New Jersey in a pretty ghetto area. He’s totally obsessed with the Lord of the Rings series, comic books, role playing games and that sort of thing. His main goal in life is to find love and get laid. After he graduates high school… then college… and it’s never happened, he starts to give up hope.
The back story and Oscar’s family history is also talked about a lot. They are recently immigrated from the Dominican and a lot of the family history takes place in Santo Domingo. The thread that ties all of these together is the idea of “fuk” or bad luck that runs through his family’s veins. Another idea really explored is the experience of immigration and how it has panned out in the life of Oscar and his family.
What I Thought: I do not want to take away from the literary merit of this book. It really is unique and important and well written. The language was rich and real and just grabbed me. I had a lot of issues with this book, but still loved reading it and found myself really involved in the story. So, I’m about to do a good bit of complaining but I want to preface it with this: I do think it was deserving of the Pulitzer and I understand the hype.
However….
First things first. When authors don’t use normal, acceptable grammatical rules, it ticks me off. I wrote this blog post to Junot Diaz while reading this book and mean it. Use quotation marks. Grrr.
Second: I took Spanish in high school, but never became comfortable with it and haven’t used it at all since then. This book is written in a mix of English and Spanish. There would be whole sentences written in Spanish, not to mention the random Spanish words that kind of peppered every page. I didn’t have a translating dictionary with me, so I just kind of skimmed over these parts and tried to guess what it was saying.
Between all the Spanish and the hundred million comic book reference, I came out feeling like I’d really only read and understood about half of the book. I do have to say that there were three or four references to The Stand that made me squeal a little.
My last complaint is pretty unlike me. I’m not this person that reads “Women’s Literature” or anything like that, but the attitude towards women in this book kind of made me gag a little. Even the parts of the book that were written from Oscar’s sister’s point of view totally objectified women and got on my nerves. Women were called horrible names and treated horribly and made me pretty uncomfortable. Meh.
So. That’s that. There were parts that I really didn’t like at all. Mostly the Spanish and the crazy amount of comic book references. But, somehow, I came out really kind of liking the story. I think that, especially right now with immigration being a hot-button topic, this is an important contribution to the conversation. Most immigration stories take place years ago, but this is a modern story of what immigration to America looks like and how it effects families.
Conclusion: You’ll probably like this more if you are way, way nerdy and fluent in Spanish, but even without these pre-qualifiers, you can really get into it. I would recommend this with reservation.