Robert M. (shotokanchef) reviewed on 2/6/2011 + 813 more book reviews

It is easy to understand why this is a recent Pulitzer Prize winner (also several other awards). All in the name of art, Diaz has managed to undermine todays political correctness by expertly employing the current English language vernacular; in the first fifteen pages he manages to squeeze in more than a dozen four-letter references (the F word is his favorite) to bodily functions, not to mention his free use of the N word. This could be Redd Foxx, or Richard Prior (before his awakening) that I am reading. For those of you somewhat competent in street-level Spanish, there are numerous colloquialisms in his native tongue. Keep a Spanish-English dictionary handy, or go to the Internet at www.annotated-oscar-wao.com. Also, as Cole Porter tells us to brush up your Shakespeare, you should brush up your Sci-Fi genre all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs; the protagonist is a nerdy, trekki kind of a game-playing, bookish misfit. So without all of the street argot Diaz would never have become, after two published books, a professor of writing at MIT. I must admit, though, that much of his dialogue (sans quotation marks) is presented in an amusing manner, much like that of a street-tough standup comic. In many ways this book is less about Oscar and his family than it is about the Trujillo regime (read the multitudinous footnotes) in the Dominican Republic, For another side of which you should read In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez: a work referenced at least twice in this book. So based upon the plethora of Sci-Fi bibliography do you wonder if Diaz is an over-achiever researcher, a la Updike, or if he is really the Sci-Fi part of Oscar Wao?

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