junot díaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007

Junot Díaz completely mixes up Dominican English/Spanish or Spanish/English slang in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a.k.a. This is only the second book I’ve ever read, apart from China Miéville’s Embassytown, where the conscious and intended impediment or challenge to the reader is the very words on the page – new words, strange words, a different parole resulting in a foreign-looking langue.

Next review: the flipside of this argument Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights by Salman Rushdie. However, by the time I got it, three, four readings later, the poetry of Junot Díaz’s English/Spanish had completely infused my mind. The specifics, that of the Dominican Republic, were completely foreign to me until I read this. Another problem was the subject – it is about immigrants and the persistence of their culture even in their new life, like invisible hands pulling them back to their homeland. One is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which it is literally the language that is the problem – it might as well have been partially written in Klingon for all I understood of it when I read it the first time. But I’ve recently got through two novels that were hard to read and to finish because of the style in which they were written. It could be because of obscure references, bad editing, bad translation, weird printing, etc. Some books are hard to read and hard to finish. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (Penguin Random House, 2007, 1st ed.) Hard to read but worthwhile reading

Junot díaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007