This should have been titled Oscar's Tragic Quest for Pussy. In expletive-laden fragments, Junot Diaz equates love with lust.Another thing that I don't find endearing is Diaz's portrayal of Dominican Republic. He sets the country's political turmoil as the background of his story. Abuse of power, oppression, and torture come aplenty in the lives of the characters. However, instead of making a point against those ills, Diaz glamorizes them. The book lacks compassion.
American critics, though, couldn't rave enough about Oscar. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, a b--tch in her own right, says "[Diaz has] written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." Distinctive? I see the poetic arrangement of words less as a skill than as a handicap common to non-native English writers. As a reader who is non-English, I appreciate more a prose that glides smoothly in the tongue.
