Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Just finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and here are some quick thoughts: - Diaz's writing gives one a sense that he is more concerned about what other writers think of his work than what readers think. Every sentence and turn of phrase feels over-work shopped and over-edited as Diaz tries way too hard to be clever. When he is unable to decide on a single pop culture reference, he rattles off five. This makes for choppy narration and a story without flow. - In addition to the multitude of pop-culture and science fiction references Diaz also includes as "gadgets" extensive footnotes and lots of Spanish/Spanglish. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but overall it's too much distraction. I often found myself having to reread chunks of the actual story because a page long footnote made me forget what was happening. And while I've read Tolkien, Watchmen and have seen the movie Akira, there were many references I did not get or did not find all that additive to the book. I also speak a decent amount of Spanish and yet found myself wondering if I was missing something important because I did not understand ~20% of the Spanish in the book. If you're going to include huge footnotes, consider throwing some translation in there, too. - Putting my issues with style aside, the story itself presents some problems for me. The characters tend towards caricatures and Oscar in particular lacks depth. He's basically a Dominican version of the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons. The narrative is choppy (intentionally in some respects) but Diaz does not do enough to give us a sense of magnitude or structure at the beginning of the book. Not knowing where you're going in a story can be fine sometimes, but the problem here was I also did not care. - Diaz's presence is also too strong at the end, where it is clear he had a hard time. Instead of choosing an ending, he basically gives us four, resulting in the dilution of all of them. Maybe I'm too insular in my tastes just as the Nobel committee thinks many Americans are in their writing. But to think of this book and last year's winner, The Road, as being remotely on par with each other makes me cringe.