« Alan Wake | Main | Dan Telfer »

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I talk a lot about expectations and how that colors my enjoyment of media. And I guess I don't have a point about that except to say that, yeah, I do that and I'm going to keep doing it. For example, I had somewhere mis-read a review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and had the idea that it was about a Chinese-American kid who commits suicide or something. I was, in fact, completely wrong. The book is about a Dominican-American youth (who, yes, dies by the end of the book), and his family, and the history of the Dominican Republic. That sentence maybe makes it sound a little dry, a little ordinary. This is quite an extraordinary book. There's a lot of Spanish in the book, for instance, about a tenth of which I understand, but that was OK because it's written so well that I just kind of let it wash over me and carry me along. There's also a lot of nerdiness in the book, which might be the part that you don't understand, but man it spoke to me.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on March 1, 2011 8:22 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Alan Wake.

The next post in this blog is Dan Telfer.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.