Gilead by Marilynne Robinson -- Book Review

"I was struck by the way the light fell that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light--pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar."

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I gave up on this one. I know it won a Pulitzer, and the last Pulitzer Prize-winner I read was amazing, click here to see my review of Oscar Wao, but I just couldn't do it. I made it to page 76, but I kept falling asleep on the couch.

The language is beautiful and stark, but nothing is happening. The premise of the book is an elderly father recording the story of his family for a very young son, who the father knows he will not be able to watch grow up. It's a touching idea, and works well for the beginning, but I would have liked to have read more family stories and less, I'm watching you and your mother blow soap bubbles at the cat. Maybe I should have given it a few dozen more pages, but the New Year is right around the corner, and I wanted to return it to the library and get a fresh stack of books to choose from.

Feel free to explain to me what a terrible mistake I made, that the book actually gets good on page 80, because I really did want to like it, and might pick it up again at some point.

Don't forget to enter the giveaway for The Time Traveler's Wife. The deadline in January 31, 2009.

Buy Gilead from Amazon.com

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz -- Book Review

"You live as long as I did in the heart of fuku country, you hear these kinds of tales all the time. Everybody in Santo Domingo has a fuku story knocking around in their family. I have a twelve-daughter uncle in the Cibao who believed that he'd been cursed by an old lover never to have make children. Fuku. I have a tia who believed she'd been denied happiness because she'd laughed at a rival's funeral. Fuku. My parental abuelo believes that diaspora was Trujillo's payback to the pueblo that betrayed him. Fuku.

It's perfectly fine if you don't believe in these 'superstitions.' In fact, it's better than fine--it's perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fuku believes in you."


I don't know how to review this book without sounding like an echo of all the reviews that have come before. I absolutely loved the book, read passages of it to my mother and sister (I'm home for Christmas) and even read out loud to myself to feel the rhythm of it. The writing is like everyday poetry, written to feel bare and natural. The Spanglish didn't bother me, I speak a little Spanish so there were only a few points where I ran across a sentence I couldn't approximate the meaning of.

I have a little experience with Hispanic culture, although I don't know any Dominicans, and I think that is part of what drew me into this book. I am 1/4 Puerto Rican and have visited some of my family there. The writing really reminded me of the easy they switch back and forth between Spanish and English in a single conversation, substituting whenever one language or the other supplies the better word. There's something rich and enticing about mixing languages, especially for someone like me who never got beyond the basics of a second language despite several years of schooling.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao pretends to be about Oscar, a fat, geeky Dominican teenager living in New Jersey, but in reality, it's a story about family and legacy. The book, which is narrated by someone who was once a friend of Oscar and his sister, spends most of its time travelling back and forth through several generations of Oscar's family, which may be cursed by the fuku, or not, it's never entirely clear. The story is laced with references to the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and even the Sound of Music and contains footnotes on Dominican history and the rule of Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and FuckFace).

The book doesn't offer a pretty picture of Dominican life and culture, but rather is laced with sex, violence, and misogyny. Most of the characters are hard to relate to or feel sympathy for and at points you wonder why you care what happens to them at all, but yet the book draws you in. Like a train crash, you know its headed for disaster, but you just can't pull yourself away.

"I'm not entirely sure Oscar would have liked this designation. Fuku story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He'd ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?
But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fuku?"

If you need a more detailed review, check out the always excellent New York Times Review here.

Buy The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on Amazon.com