Wonderful and lyrical, tragic and thought-provoking 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner. Uses multiple points of view to poignantly examine the experience of three young adults straddling between their origins in a Dominican Repulic decimated by war and their transition to a lower class area of New Jersey. T...
Another book I picked up from a used book sale. The book grabbed me by its intro, which mixes pop culture and scifi/fantasy references with historical details from the Dominican Republic and a little bit of magic and curses. How does that even work? How is it possible that the first chapters describ...
31/5 - This isn't working for me. The footnotes are bothering me particularly. I barely know anything about the Dominican Republic and I feel like Diaz expects me to be well versed in their history and their notable historical figures, as well as other pop culture references that are as clear as mud...
This book had been recommended to me over and over but I kept putting it off. Now I understand why everybody wanted me to read it. This book shows you the life of Oscar and his family in a very special, latinamerican way, with passion, fury, magic and resignation. It truly felt as if I was readi...
I'm really not sure what I can say about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'm not even 100% sure I actually enjoyed it. It's the story of several generations of a Dominican family and the supposed curse that lingers around them from the time of the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Chronologically...
The most important work of the post second world war literature is 100 Years of Solitude. I would have preferred Lolita, 1984 or Last Exit to Brooklyn to be the most important work. While I love 100 Years of Solitude, it has led to a lot of disappointing writing. Oscar Wao is very much in that tr...
Fantastic.It's hard to describe this book or the effect that it has. The novel is an exposé on the troubled history of the de Leon/Cabral family, their immigration from the Dominican Republic to America, and how a curse that stretches all the way back to that pendejo Christopher Columbus haunts them...
In an interview I read (but can't seem to find) with Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son*, Johnson describes how the individual narratives of the people of North Korea were inseparable from that of their (then) Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. So too were the stories of those living in the Domi...
Why, o why, some books become bestsellers?I guess Wao became one because it deals with dictatorship in Dominican Republic, but there is also magic realism (clumsy for my taste) and infinite (or seemingly so, until the end) references to Lord of the Rings. Such a hard read (even with annotated site)....
Gods, what a frustrating novel. So desperately did I want to like this that I set it down and tried again a day later, having let the strangeness wash over me and the language settle into my head. In a combination of English and the occasional Spanish, Oscar Wao is the story of a short and frustra...
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