Over on my travel writing blog, I reviewed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a couple of months ago. It’s a first novel by Junot Díaz that takes place mostly in the Dominican Republic, and was something my friend Katrina passed on to me because it was hyped up as being a great novel – one of my favourite novelists, Hanif Kureishi, had really said good things about it. Despite that, Katrina told me it wasn’t that great, but thought it might be interesting for me to look at it anyhow.

She was right, I think – in my opinion, it wasn’t so fantastic. Not bad, but sometimes confusing in the storyline and characters, riddled with footnotes (my strong opinion is that the author should decide whether or not something is important or not and then either include it in the main story or delete it – a novel is not an academic work!) and not compellingly page-turning. Not bad, but not great.

Well, who I am to judge. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao just won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Hmm. I’m curious now to read some of the other finalists, like Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson and Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Stories by Lore Segal. The Pulizter winner gets $10,000 so it’s not as wealthy a prize as I’d expected – but obviously the prestige is priceless.

Posted in Awards for Writers, Reading Fiction | 1 Comment »