The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Junot Díaz.
Junot Díaz tells the story of a Dominican life - from the ancestral homelands to present day United States. The story is told through Yunior (seen to be some kind of alter ego of the author) who tells the story of Oscar, his sister Lola, their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral; and grandfather, Abelard.
The novel is written with footnotes, Spanish dialect, comic book and fantasy references - and covers a couple of years of Domincan Republic history.
The language is lyrical, you read from page to page, there is violence as a thread running through it.
Some things are understood, some things have to be checked. It is good reading these books with the different bits of language, the author in an interview had said "So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.”"
asi es!
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