The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The thing that is most interesting to me about this book is that I hated it... at first. It wasn't the "spanglish" or the slang, in fact it wasn't really anything that we talked about in class that bothered me so much. It was simply the fact that the syntax irritated me to no end. The story was set up with annoying little footnotes, huge gaping holes in the plot, and an unusual amount of seemingly unneccessary information. However, as the story progressed, things began to shift into focus. For instance, if the footnotes had not been there, I would not have been able to fully understand the harshness of the Trujillo reign, or the implications that it cast on the people. Though I didn't realize it initially, the gaping holes are what kept me reading in the first place; it was like I just had to know what happened. And what about all that "unneccessary information"? Turns out it wasn't so unneccessary after all. Everything fit together in the end with surprising ease. Once everything was said and done, it was like the story just made sense to me (which is odd considering I have never moved to a new country and can in no way relate to the characters for any other reasons, either). That in and of itself is a feat. Diaz allowed me to understand a family of characters that I have nothing in common with. This was different than other stories in that it didn't try to make the information easily accessable to you. Instead, Diaz made you work for it. To put it concisely, I really liked the book. It was a struggle, but in the end it was well worth it.