AliCorbin reviewed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Review of 'Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
It was an interesting mix of humor and abject terror, set, by turns, in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. There were a wealth of long meandering footnotes to explain the history of the DR and to describe various of Trujillo's henchmen. While at the same time leaving untranslated huge swathes of Spanish. Which must have been a DR slang version of Spanish. Possibly a scatological DR version of Spanish.
The novel is structured as a series of related short stories, hopping and skipping forward and backward in time and bouncing between the DR and the US, with each one told from the point of view of a different family member. It was sometimes difficult to figure out who was narrating each section, or how they all stitched together. Or what the meanings of the Symbols were supposed to be.