The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Well I finished The Road today. Or maybe I should put the road, since Cormac McCarthy wouldn't put capitals anyway. Hrmph. Anyway, I liked the overall premise of the book, the post-apocalyptic world was dark and real, but I just couldn't get past the pretentious style and the lack of punctuation, and then the last paragraph really irritated me. I was trying hard to like the book, but then the ending was underwhelming, and that pretty much cinches my lack of interest in reading more McCarthy. Sorry Noel.

But today we had the book club meeting about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which I did enjoy. I didn't like it as much as the rest of the people in the group, but I would still say it was a funny, quick, literate read. Oscar, a lonely, overweight, nerdy Dominican boy wants to be the next Tolkien. His sister Lola clashes with their mother Beli, who had a rough life of her own back in the DR before she came to New Jersey. The story flashes back and forth between Beli living in the Dominican Republic under the brutal dicatorship of Trujillo, and the present day lives of Oscar and Lola in New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be cool, and to have a girlfriend, but he can't lose weight, and he can't help his love of sci fi and RPGs.

Diaz's narrative is strong and persuasive; although the characters are over the top they're still believable somehow, and you want to root for them to succeed. I also really liked the footnotes in the story, which give some of the back story on atrocities commited by Trujillo and his "minions". There are also tons of sci-fi references though, the Tolkien ones were easy enough to follow, but some of them were a little too obscure for me. The part of the book that I found most frustrating was that there is a lot of Spanish (or perhaps more aptly Spanglish) in the book. Usually it's restricted to pejorative exclamations, so although you may not know exactly what's being said you can get a pretty good idea of the context. Sometimes, however, there are whole sentences in Spanish, which made me feel like I was occasionally missing the punchline. I'd give this book a 7 because if you can get past the distractions of the Spanish and Nerd languages, the characters are funny, and the book itself is charming in a helter skelter sort of way.