Junot Díaz's Pulitzer winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a disappointment. This is a like-mother like-son story of foolish, obsessive, unrequited love. In both cases, the obsession is dangerous because the object of his/her affection has connections to Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic for thirty years. Single mother Beli, her daughter Lola, and son Oscar live in Paterson, New Jersey, but the real action takes place in the DR where their roots are. I found the voluminous footnotes and the slang, often in Spanish, particularly exasperating. Also, the not-always-identifiable narrator changes frequently and is sometimes first person, sometimes third, with lots of backtracking in time. This choppiness robbed the story of continuity, not to mention making it a bit challenging to follow. My favorite narrator, though, was Yunior, also a Dominican in New Jersey, who is Lola's occasional lover and Oscar's occasional college roommate. Yunior grows to genuinely care for Oscar, the bumbling obese nerd who pines for women he can't have. Oscar is too maladjusted and clueless with his Tolkien-inspired and Jedi-infused techno-speak to be a likeable character, but Yunior manages to tell the lovesick Oscar's story in a compassionate way.
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