Lust for life

Bless the library system. In my bid to stop squandering (well, spending, I don't consider money on books to be badly spent) so much of my money on reading material, I've been trying to use the library more – and generally succeeding. They have for the most part had what I wanted and random browsing has also turned up some things that I wasn't looking for and you can't say fairer than that. It was rifling through the returns shelf for something I was looking for that made me stumble across The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The name rang a bell somewhere so I picked it up – Pulitzer winner, looked interesting, job done.

It wasn't quite what I expected either. Judging a book by the blurb can be a fruitless exercise. In hindsight it bears a resemblance to what is written, at the same time it doesn't quite capture it for me. For a start, it's been a while since I've picked up something written with such zest and energy, both of which were pretty boundless, flowing out from the pages. The writing zips along, interspersed with dialect and punctuated where necessary with footnotes predominantly to cover the references to Dominican history, which I was completely ignorant of. The narration was definitely what set the book apart and made it a lot fresher than it could otherwise have been.

Told from multiple viewpoints from members of the same family (plus our narrator, who is close to, but not of, the family) over various periods of time, I suppose the scope, the history, the culture that shows through would make it a contender for a 'Great Dominican Novel' – I certainly have a feel for it, though it's hard to draw too many conclusions from a single experience. And I liked most of the stories too, the only one which I struggled to get on with was Abelard. The rest – Lola, Beli, Yunior and particularly Oscar (who I couldn't help but sympathise with) – were all interesting and distinctive. I liked the curse and counter-curse elements too, they helped tie the separate stories together and certainly held up their end of the bargain in the form of the ending, which I guess I didn't see coming.

Book number: 45
Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Díaz
Category: Pulitzer Prize winners