The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

⚖The case for it

Yunior narrates in profane, digressive Spanglish, and the footnotes on the Trujillo dictatorship are where readers say they learned more Dominican history than school ever taught them: “The sway of the language! The bar-tale footnotes!” The genre obsessions are not decoration, since Díaz runs Tolkien and comic books straight through a family’s political history, which one reader calls “a contemporary Dominican Lord of the Rings.” Beli’s chapters in the Dominican Republic work as a novella of their own. Dominican readers describe recognising their own households on the page. “I really cared about Oscar, Lola, and Beli,” readers say of “a gorgeous post-modern pastiche.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The footnotes run half a page in small type and break the story every time they appear: “I HATE THEM anywhere outside of a research paper.” There are no quotation marks, so following a conversation takes work, and the Spanish goes untranslated, leaving readers whose “ears didn’t catch all of it” guessing at tone. Oscar barely acts, defined by wanting and by other people telling him to change. Yunior catalogues women’s bodies and treats his own infidelity as weather, so “his mind is only on fucking every girl he knows.” A few readers find the prose “something akin to a high school fanfiction.”

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings