Just finished Oscar Wao --- Wow!

Saw Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on several lists, but it wasn't until two people -- folks who score very high on my they-know-a-good-book-when-they-read-one meter -- told me they deemed it the most important book they'd read lately that I sought it out. I think one of them used the word "tranformative."

I rarely buy books anymore (it's a librarian thing) but made a beeline to the bookstore when I discovered the reserve lists were too long at not one, two but three local libraries. It's one thing for some one to tell you X is a good book. It's quite another to have them say it's "important" and quite another thing again to hear it from two people. Not too far into it someone noticed the title on my email signature line and wrote back to echo the first two recommenders. Need I mention that none of these folks knew about each other? By then, I was very grateful I had it in my hand and rearranged my schedule yesterday to put in some time with it. I was not disappointed.

Oscar Wao is down right hypnotic. The narration pulled me through from page one without let up until the very end. Diaz's use of the second person point of view kind grabs you around the throat and he has no problem sustaining the level of intensity. Feels like something really important will happen on every very next page. And he does this while sliding fluidly between generations and settings. Felt like he could have easily kept going for another 300 pages.

Besides a great story, great characters and slick narrative structure, Diaz's book is brilliant this way, too:
Being a middle-age white girl from the suburbs of Buffalo (my husband calls it the Midwest), I couldn't help but feel a little left out of Diaz's story. My Spanish barely sufficed to wrap my head around the frequent injection of Dominican idiom and I'm sure I missed much. I was grateful for his employment of footnotes (which allow him to extend narrative tangents) to provide me with the historical and cultural context I needed. Diaz brilliantly, I think, included plenty of the universal to carry me through and make me wish I was more aware of the experience of families like the de Leons and the Cabrals. I, too, will be telling people this is an important book.

For younger readers and anyone who has lived a life anything like Oscar's or Oscar's family, Diaz's novel must read like the story that's being waiting too long to be told. It will speak directly to them. Literature is important because it reflects back our own culture, in all it's beauty and horror, and makes us better for it. Thank you, Junot Diaz, for writing this book.

Near the end of the novel, Diaz's narrator Yunior makes a passing reference to lovers of good books enjoying literary epiphanies. It seems to me Diaz wrote one.