The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in #unpresidentedreads Challenge 2017

May 31, 2014 Antoinette Perez added it

This is a book club pick I am down with. I started reading it while on a plane, with no wi-fi, so I got in the habit of roughly translating frequent handfuls of Spanish phrases and colloquialisms based on my rusty formal castilian Spanish, context, and digging for Latin roots. On one hand, my confidence in reading simple Spanish again is high! By the end of the book I was translating really well. On the other hand, this could be a frustrating exercise for someone who needs a Spanish dictionary a ...more

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Mar 20, 2017 Elizabeth R rated it it was ok

Shelves: book-club, bipoc-authors

Bored. I was bored for most of this book. I think it might've been the author's yappy tone, because the characters were interesting enough, particularly the women. It didn't help that the first section was teenage Oscar and how he was too fat for girls to have sex with but he really wanted to have sex with girls and also did you know girls have breasts and asses and vaginas (only spoken of in Spanish slang) and sex and then did the author mention sex? It basically beat you over the head with the Bored. I was bored for most of this book. I think it might've been the author's yappy tone, because the characters were interesting enough, particularly the women. It didn't help that the first section was teenage Oscar and how he was too fat for girls to have sex with but he really wanted to have sex with girls and also did you know girls have breasts and asses and vaginas (only spoken of in Spanish slang) and sex and then did the author mention sex? It basically beat you over the head with the fact that Dominicans must have lots and lots of sex to own their own identities as Dominicans, and that Oscar was too fat and nerdy to get any. That's it. For pages. Over and over. I wasn't offended: I was bored. Things did not improve noticeably through the rest of the book. Did we really need to hear about how magnificent Beli's breasts or Lola's ass were every single time they were mentioned? Did that help flesh (har!) out their characters? Nope. In a related note, however, I *do* think we needed to hear repetitively how dark-skinned Dominicans were looked down upon by their fellow citizens. For a super white American, it's not something I necessarily remembered enough as we went through the book.

I get it. Sex. That had to be in there. Ideally, it would be balanced by the rest of the characters' lives, the things that happen in the, say, 10-14 hrs/day when they aren't having sex or actively pondering sex. There was definitely other stuff--a lot of the book read like a thinly veiled Dominican history book, pop-style--but not enough to sustain my interest. The structure of the book was a bit awkward too, though once I figured out we were going backwards in a more or less linear fashion, that part was ok.

I had to read this with Google translate open, and that was one of the things I appreciated. If this was really going to be a book about Dominican-Americans, of course there had to be tons of Spanish, both proper and slang. I know a lot more dirty words in Spanish now! Should really come in handy with my work with children under 5 and their families. I also appreciated those Dominican history lessons. The super long, yappy footnotes were jarring, but I can't think of another way to get the info in there. And it does need to be - I must say the average American, myself very much included, isn't going to dig deep into Carribean history.

In the end, the book was deeply evocative of culture, and I liked that. The janky structure and storyline, the yappy narrative voice, and the repetitive sexual references dragged this one down, so much so that I don't feel the desire to read any more of this author. ...more

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