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 enlarge | Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Riverhead
Category: EBooks
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $8.40
You Save: $5.60 (40%)
Rating:  192 reviews
Sales Rank: 38
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Publication Date: September 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Badly written, no coherent story September 19, 2008
April Greenberg
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book was quite a disappointment. After hearing the author interviewed on Fresh Air, hearing from my friend Steven that it was an excellent book, and waiting through 99 Holds at the library, my hopes and expectations were up. But after reading 80 pages in three days, and suffering through most of those, I stopped. I'll give it back to the library today to pass along to the next 78 people waiting on Holds.
This book rambles. It's not well-written. Some of it reads like bad colloquial writing, not quite stream-of-consciousness, but not quite anything else either. Sometimes I'd read a few pages and then stop and ask myself what was the point.
A secondary criticism I have is that there is so much Spanish thrown into what passes for dialog that at times I couldn't figure out from context what it meant. This book needed a glossary if it wants to appeal to non-Dominicans, which I thought it did. But the book reads like something written for and aimed only at the insiders, which I don't believe was actually Diaz's intention.
Thirdly (and this is very minor, a geeky pedant's complaint) Diaz threw in quite a lot of nerdy references to fantasy and sci-fi genre stories without making them fit in or giving them interesting context. As if he had a piece of paper listing nouns from Tolkien stories and just throwing them in at random instead of really making them fit; at times it seemed so arbitrary that I wondered if he actually read the books from which he was taking references.
Minor points aside, I found this book unfinishable and a waste of my time.
 A lot of Spanish and cultural references September 17, 2008
Steven M. Anthony (Arkansas)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is really a very good book (as if the Pulitzer Prize didn't tip you off). Seriously though, I've tried to read some Pulitzer winners that I abandoned rather quickly. This book, on the other hand, is extremely engaging and captivating.
It is essentially the story of a family from the Dominican Republic, immigrated to Paterson, New Jersey. It begins with the current second generation Americans and works its way backward to mid-20th century DR, focusing to a large extent on the political history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. This history is largely relegated to extensive footnotes, a method that some apparently find objectionable, but that didn't bother me in the least. In fact, I found the DR history lesson to be one of the strong suits of the novel.
I had two issues with the novel, however, that should be noted. The first is the EXTENSIVE use of Spanish throughout the novel. This took two forms. The first, and least problematic, were the frequent slang words sprinkled throughout the book. Most of these were easily identifiable through context. Who knew there were so many different Spanish slang terms for the female sexual organ?
More troublesome by far, were the entire Spanish sentences, many times very meaningful to the flow of the story that would suddenly appear, without translation or context. I don't understand this. This is a novel written in English for a largely English speaking audience, yet at key points in the story, very meaningful dialog is issued in Spanish. It's almost as if the author is thumbing his nose at the reader.
The second issue which could impact a reader's enjoyment of the writing is the almost non-stop reference to fantasy and science fiction characters and story lines, most predominantly Lord of the Rings. You see, Oscar was immersed in fantasy and science fiction literature and sees the world through that prism. I'm not talking about having read Lord of the Rings in middle school. I'm talking about deep Tolkien references. If you are not familiar with the Witch King of Angmar, you may still enjoy the book, but will not grasp many of the references and subtleties. Luckily, I recognized most of them.
This novel is at times painful to read. It is a story that involves great cruelty and much suffering, but it is beautiful nonetheless. If you are an avid reader, with a background in science fiction and fantasy and happen to be bilingual as well, this may be the most enjoyable book you have ever read. My lack of Spanish fluency was an issue and caused me to teeter between four and five stars, but the story and writing were simply too good to fall below the highest rating. Four and three-quarters stars rounds to five.
Great book - curiosity required September 15, 2008
Sinohe K. Terrero (Bronx, NY)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is really a time machine in a book. It takes you from Patterson NJ in the nineties to DR in the 30s to DR in the 50s to Manhattan in the 70s. But it's so much more than that. It's about family, love, adolescence (and the insecurities and expectations that come with it) About dreams and much more, so much more.
Junot Diaz spins the web of this story line with insight and style.
Great read if you can relate or are just curious about other cultures.
Automated cultural scripts September 14, 2008
Juviebetfixer (Turin, Italy)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I just read Diaz's entire back catalogue from 'The New Yorker', which numbers almost a dozen stories. The guy *must* be incredible. And yet every story sounds exactly the same. Exactly. Without the cultural accessorization, would this be getting the same attention?
So I played a game where, in my browser window, I searched for the word 'Dominican' in each story. I couldn't find a single story without this tip o' the hat to the myth of origins, and not a single work in his pantheon of homeboys where D.R. wasn't referenced in the first paragraph, and a dozen times thereafter.
The guy's proud of his birthplace. It has served him extremely well as an author, by providing a seemingly inexhaustible backdrop of allusions and references. I see now that Great Writing is just a matter of where you were born as much as what you have to 'say'. In the case of this novel, as manly and energetic as the storytelling is, the real content is kind of lacking. The usual strategy of making endless references to some dimension of mass culture (Tolkien, in this case), cross-faded with loanwords for streetcred (which is easier than just writing in Spanish, and thus driving away the guilt-laden audience whom you are targetting).
Well, this novel--which is an inflated version of a previously published short story--sure has verve, The shadow of John Fante looms large.
Sci-Fi geek. Salsa sistah. Pimps, ho's, cheatin', thievin', immigrating, ain't bad rememberin', and all the rest of the Coming to America tale. OH MY GOD IT'S EXCELLENT. Absolutely brilliant. Diaz's the greatest writer of all time. So cool, so honest, so handsome. I think you should all write him immediately and send your thanks -- without these street smug tales of uncorked penises, you probably would not now Just How Hard Life Really Is.
Damn, I wish I had been born somewhere cool. If you're an author who grew up in a suburb, forget it. No Pulitzers for you. Either it's _Angela's Ashes_ or footnoted tales of Dominican despots (and the drug addled diaspora.)
 Entertaining but not much of a story September 13, 2008
C. J. Allensworth (Toronto, ON)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I want to start off by saying there was much to like about this narrative. I enjoyed the colorful array of characters that make up Oscar's world. The immigrant to America saga, the various sojourns of his family, not bad stuff. The drawbacks for me was too much of the ethnic asides: heavy cultural nuances, etc., did not put me in there, but made me feel very uninvolved. So it was off putting. The other is--yeah, okay- we have an entire novel based on this over-weight, homely adolescent, Oscar and not much really happens. When I think that this won the Pulitzer, I find it quite baffling, actually.
Halfheartedly recommend, but lacks the true hilarity and depth of SIM0N LAZARUS, a little-known wonder that deserves more acclaim than this.
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