Review of 'Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A great book! It just misses out on the full five stars due to the lack of annotations; the early chapters of the book contain a lot (a lot!) of Dominican Spanish, slang (including some, shall we say, challenging language), and popular cultural references with many of them lacking translations or explanatory notes, and this means that progress in reading this book is slowed by having to look-up terms and definitions. Thankfully this becomes less of an issue in the second half of the book, but I can see why this might put some readers off, and this is a shame as this is a book worth sticking with [incidentally, there are a couple of websites which offer some annotations for the book and these are a great help, although they are not comprehensive and do not appear to be maintained and have gaps filled].
I feel like I have …
A great book! It just misses out on the full five stars due to the lack of annotations; the early chapters of the book contain a lot (a lot!) of Dominican Spanish, slang (including some, shall we say, challenging language), and popular cultural references with many of them lacking translations or explanatory notes, and this means that progress in reading this book is slowed by having to look-up terms and definitions. Thankfully this becomes less of an issue in the second half of the book, but I can see why this might put some readers off, and this is a shame as this is a book worth sticking with [incidentally, there are a couple of websites which offer some annotations for the book and these are a great help, although they are not comprehensive and do not appear to be maintained and have gaps filled].
I feel like I have learned quite a bit about the Dominican Republic and it's turbulent history in the twentieth-century, and have done so via a family of characters who are fleshed out (quite literally in Oscar's case) with both positive and negative aspects. There is humour, drama, love, cruelty, action, and tragedy in the pages and I looked forward to picking it up during the period in which I read it, and I can think of no better recommendation than that.
