The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.

I really wanted to like this more. I enjoyed the style, the references, the mix of languages. But the abrupt shifts in narrative were frustrating. I was enjoying Oscar and Lola's stories but then it shifted to the mother's back story in DR and things seemed to grind to a halt for a long time. It was perhaps the footnotes on the history that kept me going through that.

The ending. There was a moment forwards the end where the narrator questioned his narrative choices and perhaps the reality of Oscar's character that seemed to break the rest of the book. The spell, the acceptance of the narrative was punctured, removing you from the story, leaving you to question why Oscar ended up in this improbable situation, and the book never really recovered from this. And as a brief life, the ending was perhaps justified (especially given the nature of life in the DR) but just didn't work. After the narrative had broken down, there didn't seem to be anywhere to go but to just end it.