En la noche, cuando estaba echado en la cama pensando en la chica de la que estaba enamorado, una fresita cuya familia era de Cancún, tuve la visión de un pobre nerd negro y jodido del gueto llamado Oscar Wao, el tipo de nerd del gueto que habría sido yo si no me hubieran "descubierto" las chicas el primer año de high school. Oscar no iba a ser el caribeño sexy por el que la industria del turismo vive y muere. Me di cuenta de que podía escribir acerca de este chico nerd que vive obsesionado por la historia y por las chicas, que sólo es bueno para la fantasía y para la ciencia ficción y que, sin embargo (trágica, cómicamente), pertenece a una comunidad y a una cultura que propiamente no se enloquece por los nerds de color ni por sus intereses

Oh Mr. Días... I wanted to like this...

It wasn't a bad book, let's get that out of the way. The way the author played with the multiple narratives and somewhat stream of consciousnesses to elaborate on characters was interesting and illustrated his message perfectly. The seamlessness of the 4?5? narratives to bring to life one family was interesting and fresh, and I respect that. I wanted to like this book, desperately, but on a level of personal preference, it's definitely something I will not be rereading.

I genuinely feel the title is misleading. Call it marketing, call it a theme that brushed me by– I wasn't convinced Oscar had lived a "wondrous" life. In fact, the passages that described his overeating and compliant in gluttony made me want to throttle him, and I know depression, but if that was a cause, why wasn't that explored more?

The namedropping of science-fiction and "nerd" media grated on me. I've never been a fan of that in any work (I like my stuff a bit more timeless), and this wasn't an exception. At a certain point it didn't aide the plot; it just showed to me how much Mr. Días knows about old sci-fi/fantasy pop culture, and I couldn't give a shit about that.

I was most drawn into the world of narrator and Oscar. The moments they shared together really sucker punched me into caring a lot about them, and a part of me almost thought they'd end up together (I blame the gratuitously welcome Oscar Wilde nicknaming and the forever haunting line "But then Oscar, the dumb-ass, decided to fall in love. And instead of getting him for a year, I got the motherfucker for the rest of my life".) What can I say, I'm used to having to survive on subtext. The idea of a man spending every waking second trying to get a girl, only to end up with a boy was hilarious and fitting to me.

But alas that was not the case, and I could take that. Really, there were some moments I genuinely felt connected to the characters, but they were few and far between to care to look up much of the translations or read any of the footnotes after 20 pages.


The treatment of Oscar's suicide attempt was fine. Of course, I'd want more on that, but it almost felt wrong not to, and exactly why things went so bad for him. Depression is sprinkled in like a second ingredient to his life that's that. I don't know, I'm probably overthinking the damn story, but between his disinterest to better himself in any way or address the deeper issues made him such a stagnant character to me, and it truly infuriated me not having a hero to root for.

And maybe it's just me (actually, it's most likely, definitely me), but having the main character practically go on some kamikaze mission to woo a girl before dying horribly neither seemed worth it nor make me feel anything. I have a huge heart, inside texts and out, but the little we seemed to get of Oscar to begin with just made me feel like I'd wasted the last two days reading it.


I'm not going to mention the storyline of his mother or grandfather because if I'm being honest, I checked out of those real quick. I understand it's part of the family curse theme, but I just didn't have enough in me to care at that point.

I don't know, this book has something, and I can see why it's so loved, but it just wasn't for me. I think I'm drawn to more formal writings and texts I can relate to more, and it's a literary fault I need to work on. I won't bash on it besides that; if you've written a book that wins a Pulitzer Prize, you're obviously doing something right. It's just going to be one of those things I shelve, unfortunately. ( )

This book inexplicably won a ton of awards, including the Pulitzer. I don't know why. I found the book sloppily executed with lazy characterizations that bordered on the stereotypical. My main annoyance were the characters seemed to be caricatures of themselves. The men were machismo to the nth degree, the women were sexpots who were the men's playthings and had no real agency of their own, and Oscar was the socially inept guy giving off the creepy vibe that I avoid at science fiction conventions. Their goal in life was to get laid. The only character that I actually liked and sympathized with was Abelard.

I was glad I read this on my Sony Reader, which had a built in Spanish dictionary, or the random Spanish words, phrases, and sentences the book was peppered with for flavor would have been lost on me. As it were, they didn't provide so much flavor as frustration when my dictionary failed to translate some slang because sometimes, that word was pretty vital to the meaning of the sentence and context clues don't always work.

Lastly, I just found it a slog to get through. Maybe it was the copious footnotes which I felt compelled to read. Maybe it was the shifting timelines which only served to disconnect me from the story. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't have a clue what was the point of the entire book while reading it, and honestly, I still don't. I didn't hate it. I didn't like it. I was completely and utterly ambivalent. There were several points where I almost put it down but persevered because it had to get better, right? After all, it won all those awards! Nope. ( )

Do you all know that entitled kid that expresses their sexist and discriminatory opinions by phrasing them as if they were the beliefs of other people and they were just *mentioning* them and commenting on them with disdain? Yeah, this is how Junot Diaz writes; but imagine it embellished with nerd culture. As if that's not torture enough.....

This cheap shot would not fly in 2020: "Diaz said he wrote the book, in part, to acknowledge the deep sexism that pervades our culture but frequently remains unaddressed. He admits that, by tackling the topic head-on, he risks writing a book that is perceived as sexist (or is sexist)." ( )

So good! ( )