GatesyRead

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