GatesyRead

This is another book that is hard to characterise quickly. It is French, of course, and Romantic – with a view of history that is decidedly Gallic. It is also based around an unrequired love story worthy of South American magic-realism, complete with an eccentric uncle who creates kites out of the highest hopes of France, so that he becomes a postman-celebrity-rebel and Auschwitz survivor. It is also an ironic story, opening with the memorable line: ‘Nowadays, the little museum in Cléry devoted to the works of Ambrose Fleury only a minor tourist attraction’ (p.1). Ambrose is Ludo Fleuro’s uncle; Ludo is the narrator and protagonist of adventures that include a trip to Poland just before the war breaks out, and a daring role in the French Resistance under the noses of the cultured Nazis who dine in France’s famous restaurant Clos Joli. The idea of a poor boy falling in love with a cold yet alluring (gothic) rich girl draws something from Dicken’s Great Expectations , and like that

For once I am at a bit of a loss as to what to write about a book. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a complex and highly original novel, and yet I have hesitated to write about what it might all mean, as I considered how I might distil my thoughts about it into a few paragraphs. The result of this has been a pause been reading and an attempt to write – what follows, therefore, is but flawed thoughts on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Others – closer to the American and Dominican Republic contexts – can do much more. On form – the novel opens in mock-essay form, as the narrator describes the concept of fukú – a sinister sort of karma – and connect this to the sense of comic-tragic tones of Oscar’s “brief wondrous life”, as well as the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. This is done via lengthy footnotes, in an extravagant manner that reminds me a little of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night. Chapter 1 then transitions from the narrator (‘Our hero was no