The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

Rating: 4 stars

I had a hard time thinking of how to rate this book because it started off in a way that I didn’t like and felt that way until a bit more than halfway through. Then that last half though was pretty good. I once had a class in graduate school that talked about beginnings and endings of a book, and I think the disparity in quality led me to not bump up the grade despite a pretty good back half.

The introduction is particularly confounding. It seems like the author speaking to you. It seems like that’s supposed to be the explicit message, that this is more like fictional history written in the style of Herodotus but about Dominicans. There will never be a part of the book where you forget that Dominica is the heart and blood of the story. Anyway, the story, in this style, is somewhat a monograph about one family’s experience with their fukú, an ancestral curse that this one family believes it has upon itself, in a few generations (or Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, which seems to be more or less the fukú). However, there are parts where the author (the actual author or the character who wrote the book (more on that later)? Up to you to decide) jokes that every Dominican family believes they’re the subject of a curse.

The book, in how it’s written, is kinda like A Visit From the Goon Squad in that each chapter is basically independent of another. It’s more linear (not temporally but in terms of resolving the overarching story), but, as I found it barely tolerable enough not to damage the story in Goon Squad, here I found it pretty disruptive and annoying. Maybe I shouldn’t have tolerated it before even, but the independence of the chapters let it be better. I’m going to lay off the postmodern books soon, and maybe that’ll help.

Okay, here’s the thing: if the book had been told completely chronologically (from the downfall of the grandfather/patriarch to the death of Oscar—spoilers, I guess, even though that’s the title of the book) I would’ve appreciated the book much more. Also, the first person narrator changes multiple times, and for me that’s a no-no (another parallel with the Goon Squad). It’s mostly Oscar’s sister’s off-and-on-again boyfriend but sometimes it’s Oscar’s sister.

I think I’ve gotten the negatives off my chest so I’ll go for the positives. It’s well written, has a voice and has a message. Just those three things are enough to make any book good and on the path to great. This one doesn’t quite get there, but it’s still a good read. I read the books I’m reading out loud to my baby a lot so I replaced almost all the n-words with people or dude, and it worked.