I just finished last year’s Pulitzer winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. This book was great and really quite funny. My only complaint was that I was expected to be bilingual. Hello Dominicans-we don’t all speak Spanish and we don’t all want too. The author must also be quite the comicon nerd because he referenced Lord of the Rings, comic books and Japanese anime left and right.
Some of my favorite quotes are:
1. It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
2. Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minis Tirith in la pequena that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.
3. In reference to the Dominican Dictator of the time Trujillo-”the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated”
4. You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope.
5. Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
6. Telling Beli not to taunt her curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recenlty discovered mutant abilities.
7. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness and humiliation can provoke in a young persons character.
Okay, these are from the 1st hundred or so pages and then I stopped writing them all down because there were so many great lines. A great book and a nice change of pace for the Pulitzer. Sometimes those books tend to have not so much story to them. They have hints of story and the words are nice and pretty, but sometimes the books are a little dull. Dull this one was not. Well done, Mr. Diaz.
