The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“...you can't regret the life you didn't lead.” Otherness, awkwardness, comfort in ones own skin, fitting in, standing out, wanting more out of life, complicated parent-child relationships, hope, friendship, loyalty, love, first kisses, self-hatred, missed connections, regrets, politics, corruption, violence, curses, legends, last kisses, death. All of it. Complex and emotional, not a fun read, but very powerful.

"I recognize the literary abilities of Junot Diaz. The book is well-written; the language hypnotic in fact. This book, for all the things that bothered me, is hard to put down.

So, the one star rating is more of a reaction to the emotional upheaval this book left me with. I just can't get behind a book so completely misogynistic. And I don't know the author's intent, and I'm afraid I don't know nearly enough about Dominican history as I should, but I was just left really quite devastated by it.

Women are objects in this novel. Objects for men to own, to destroy, to collect as many as they can. Almost every female character in the novel is cheated on, raped, attacked, beaten or murdered; sometimes more than once, sometimes all five. And while I understand the violence of the Dominican Republic during the time of Trujillo, I guess what pisses me off is the flippancy with which the narrator talks about it...

I'm not necessarily offended by these things being written about in this way...if there's a point. Perhaps a scathing commentary about the misogyny in Dominican society. But he doesn't get there and I was left with so much anger and disgust."

Not my review, but this basically sums up exactly how I felt about his book (and all of his essays) which are filled with toxic masculinity. And I already felt this before many women came forward with their own stories of the misogynistic behavior and sexual assault that occurred at Diaz's hands.

I haven't reread very many books....but I decided to listen to the audiobook version of this because I loved reading it the first time.

I read the audio version of this book. I wanted to like it more, though the jumping back and forth between different character accounts of what happened was not really clear from transition to transition. There was even another full back story of Oscar's mom's upbringing smack in the middle of the text which seemed very out of place and didn't flow well. The audio version I read had the author's story collection Drown as well. I could not even get through the entire portion of that because the short stories were not clear where they ended and began and all kind of ran together with many of the same character names.

никто не умеет писать семейные саги лучше латиноамериканцев - даже обевропившихся и обамериканившихся. поколения страстей и страданий, витки спирали, на которой никогда непонятно, сам по себе ты личность или просто пришло твое время сыграть партию в семейном оркесте и уступить место следующему