Ten years after his acclaimed short story collection Drowned, Junot Diaz returns with a lollapalooza of a debut novel centered on a grotesquely overweight Dominican-American teenager named Oscar. Lonely, loveless, and living almost completely inside his own head, Oscar is a "ghetto nerd" whose multiple obsessions include comic books, fantasy fiction, and supremely unobtainable women. In a story that moves back and forth between the Dominican Republic and Paterson, New Jersey, Diaz illuminates the tragic arc of Dominican history (especially under the brutal Trujillo regime) in the lives of Oscar's sister, mother, grandmother, and aunt. Shot through with witty cultural footnotes, scabrous slang, and touches of magic realism, this heartbreaking family saga is a work of brave originality.
Pages
"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." — Bertrand Russell
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Book Review
(10)
Doris Lessing
(1)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(1)
Jeffrey Eugenides
(1)
Jennifer Egan
(1)
Jonathan Franzen
(1)
Junot Diaz
(1)
Ken Follett
(1)
Man Asia Literary Winner
(1)
Mario Vargas Llosa
(1)
Miguel Syjuco
(1)
My Fave Books
(2)
Nikos Kazantzakis
(1)
Nobel Winner
(3)
Pulitzer Winner
(4)
Nobel Prize Winners
69 members
From the sublime to the abstruse, from the bestsellers to the rightly unknown. To read the winners o...
69 members
From the sublime to the abstruse, from the bestsellers to the rightly unknown. To read the winners o...
No comments:
Post a Comment