Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: 11/18/2010
Diaz is a smarty-pants of a writer (like Chabon and DeLillo), showing off his wit and knowledge in a story that goes outside our expectations of a novel. A few Book Club members liked the combination of playfulness and intellect, comedy and tragedy. Readers put off by extensive footnotes, untranslated Spanish slang, and allusions to characters from comic books and science fiction stories didn’t enjoy it so much. Not a crowd-pleaser, this book was most appreciated by readers familiar with Spanish.
A couple of people commented that they preferred Julia Alvarez’ In the Time of the Butterflies for a novel about the Dominican Republic.