On a completely random note, I seem to be having a hard time counting the number of books I've read for this project. I keep highlighted lists in a folder(hard copy style) and I have it through here, I guess, but of course I always have my excel sheet to look at. My last entry said I had read 42 Pulitzer Prize winners, but I just counted on Wikipedia, and unless I'm missing someone, even though I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I'm still at 42. Very very odd.
Anywho...:) I must say that I'm very glad that I have such a diverse wealth of experience. Perhaps not such a huge wealth of life experience, but let's just say this: I know a little bit about a lot of things, and it definitely helps when reading a book like Oscar Wao. It's about a boy who becomes a man, named Oscar Wao, a Dungeons and Dragons playing, comic book reading Dominican fat kid(do all of these epithets go together when talking about a Dominican boy? The narrator seems to say no, but my experience with people from the DR is limited, I have one friend from culinary school who is from there and who returned to work and live there after she graduated, I'm going to tell her about the book and maybe she'll read it...she was pretty unhappy when she read the depiction of the Mirabel sisters in In the Time of the Butterflies, but I dunno, maybe this is truer to life?)who is obsessed with women. And given his rather robust appearance and his inherited not-so-much looks, he can never get laid. He has all the machismo of the Dominican male without the looks to go along with the "player" attitude. To boot, he throws himself into this world of sci-fi/fantasy, writing his own novels, obsessing over comic books and anime and everything else that that dorky world entails. And let me say this fellas, most girls aren't into that shit. Some like parts of it, some ARE D&D geeks too, but I don't think I've ever met a woman who is so head over heels in love with the gamers/comic book world like some men are. I know a little bit about a lot of that stuff because over the years I've had several male friends that are into that stuff on various levels; comic books and comic book superheroes are the top pick for my two closest guy friends, but since I'm a card-carrying lesbian, I have no problem being friends with people who are into that stuff. They're not trying to get into my pants, and I AM CERTAINLY not trying to get into theirs.:) Most women, though, don't care about that stuff at all, though, they'll go to the new Batman movie, because it's the "it" movie of the summer, but they aren't generally going to sit in the car with a boy afterward and talk about the nuances of the differences between Bruce Wayne in the comic book versus his portrayal in the latest Hollywood release. So, if you're morbidly obese, not super attractive, and are constantly spouting gamer lingo, and you're heterosexual, odds are, you're NOT screwed. That's the point. However, Oscar's constant searching for love is endearing, if not depressing as the book progresses. You want him to be in love so badly, which he is constantly, but you want him to be loved back...which he isn't. His propensity for love is so great...The book is not only about Oscar though, it is about the term "fuku"(with an accent aigu over the last u) or "curse" and what that does to a family, if there really is one...and it's about the fuku on the Dominican people and their history with Trujillo, something that I knew very little about until I read this book. In order to make the reader realize how the idea of fuku translates into Oscar's love life, or lack thereof, the narrator, presumably an ex-boyfriend of Oscar's sister, Lola, goes back in time to show how FUCKED the Wao family has been. He travels back to the Dominican Republic in time, to show what it was like during the Trujillo realm for Oscar's mother, whose entire immediate family got annihilated by Trujillo, mainly because her father refused to submit to the dictator's will regarding the virginity of his eldest daughter...Some references are in footnotes, to different people in the Trujillo regime, etc...but a large chunk of the novel is told through flashback to La Inca(Oscar's mother's cousin cum mother)'s life and Oscar's mother's life before she moved to the United States. The book shows us all the time how everyone's life is a spinoff of someone else's life and how interconnected we all are, and how like dominoes, we can be propelled forward by a chain of events that are sometimes out of our control. I loved this book. I love Hispanic culture and how the heat in some of these areas creates tempers that are just as hot? hmm...All I know is that I have a little bit of a thing for the literature from Hispanic cultures, especially that of the Dominican/Haitian/South American bent. There's something about the creativity that comes out when you've been kicked in the head so long by dictators that's really inspiring. More of this book takes place in the DR than you would think, but that's cool too. I think that part of what makes someone "American"(since after all, the Pulitzer is supposed to award people who depict some aspect of American life) is the fact that you're constantly reconciling your past to your present. I loved all the references, the phrases in Spanish, Oscar's obsession with The Watchmen. I felt like I was sharing in this part of a culture that I know nothing about. However, when I was talking to people at work about this book, one co-worker in particular didn't like the book because of all of the references. She felt like it was a secret handshake that she just didn't get or something. She thought the book dragged and was boring as well as hard to follow with all the narrators. I didn't really get that it was hard to follow in terms of narrators, but then again, my love for modernism has compelled me to read many a stream of consciousness novel. I didn't find this to be confusing like that. Though, I thought about this after the fact quite a bit: I started it and almost finished it(was shy by about 60 pages)in one weekend, devoting hour after hour to this book. I think that I had the time to sit with it and enjoy the experience. I'm not so sure this is a good book in the spurts that usually come when you're taking your reading stints where you can get them. I don't know that I would have even heard of this book had it not won the Pulitzer, which is sad, for it is very good...I'm, for some reason, much more with it when it comes to new Canadian literature. It doesn't help, either, that the Pulitzer nominees aren't advertised in advance. I think that would be cool to help hype it up. What I do like is this book may have its uppity characteristics(you can tell the author/speaker is educated), it's about poor people who are of immigrant background of one of the not so desirable racial classes. The Pulitzer is at least, with this book and others, showing that the "American life" that is written about and can win awards is not necessarily the "White Man"'s American life.:) PPs-43??, GG's-37.