Oscar Wao was a "smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto", obese, and loved girls as much as they hated him. And as if that wasn't enough, he also inherited a curse ("fukú") that had haunted his family for generations. I started this book expecting to read about a Dominican boy who was alienated because of his obsession with genre fiction, but instead I got a book that got into the heart of the politics of the Trujillo era. Not being a fan of historical fiction (I enjoy reading books on history, but not fiction based on historical events) I had my doubts about enjoying the book when the first of the information-laden footnotes appeared. Soon, however, undoubtedly helped by the narrator comparing Trujillo to Sauron, I started to enjoy the book as a work of fiction.

At first, the way the story kept changing from the present to the past and back again, made the story seem fragmented and a bit confusing. Who was narrating which bit? If the narrator was not Oscar himself, why did he know enough to put in so many sci-fi/fantasy references throughout the story? By the time I got to where Yunior was clearly the narrator and was Oscar's college roommate, I finally settled into the story. And I absolutely enjoyed what I was reading. The characters seem so real to me, and I found myself liking them. Yunior was the sort of person who would annoy me in real life, but I was rooting for him in the end, and his relationship with Lola. Oscar himself was endearing in a way - I knew several guys like him in college, being a role-player and somewhat of a genre freak myself. True, he was more like an exaggerated version of the people I knew, but he was someone familiar, someone I would have liked in real life.

I guess the use of Spanish in the book should be a problem, but surprisingly, it didn't bother me at all. I only understood 10% of the Spanish (maybe less), but it didn't ruin the book for me. It actually made the characters more real to me. It always bothered me when I watch movies set in non-English speaking countries and everyone in it spoke English all of the time. The writing was sharp and witty, and I was hooked before I knew it. Even when I was still wondering if I would really enjoy it, I was already hooked. I enjoyed all the stories told in this book, but it was Oscar's story that was the heart of it for me. It was his story that was the most compelling, although it is true that a big part of that was because of how it related to his mother's story, and his grandparents' stories. I came to the end of the story when I was in the train, and was tearing up a bit by then. I knew that the story was heading towards a tragic end, but I wasn't prepared for it. I read the last few chapters over and over in the train, before reaching my destination. I had to agree with Mr. K, who was the first customer to pick up this book at Kino, who said that this was possibly one of the best books he read this year.