Have you read it?
What did you like about it?
Are you Dominican?
How did/ does this book appeal to you?

I read it some months ago and absolutely loved it. I'm someone usually turned off by what I call 'diaspora novels'; books built too directly around the bittersweet sentiments and resentments of immigrant experiences. In general I don't read literary novels to be reminded of my own life, but to touch universal aspects in the stories of other lives. Despite that bias I thought Diaz hit it out of the park with this story. There were elements that speak to Dominican-Americans and also plenty to make it good lit that stands well on it's own aside from the disapora elements.

In my particular case I feel like the book was written directly for me, a bookish brown kid in the city. The setting in a northeastern US city, the immigrant family, the awkward teen protagonist, the many references to American literature, science fiction, comics...all of those spoke directly to me. Yet even if that stuff doesn't speak to you Diaz also used a very fresh style with the footnotes creating an intriguing historical wannabe-scholarly feel while the fierce use of slang in both languages brought it right back to gritty real life. It was both order and chaos, something I think all sorts of Antilleans, Americans n(north and south), and others can enjoy.

Yes I'm Dominican-American, but like I said I think the style and poeticism of the prose offer something even to readers who are not Dominican or immigrants from other lands. I was not surprised when he got the book prize for this.


I really hope he tackles science fiction next.

I am not really into Science fiction,


this reminds me of when i read "Bodega Dreams"

Haven't read that one yet...like I said I personally don't usually like novels where the author is just putting the 'immigrant life' on display and a title like that I assume that's what Bodega Dreams is? Stick with Oscar Wao a while but if it isn't your taste well you can't really force it.

Personally, I hate that book with a passion!!

If one really wants to feel how tragedy looks and feels like it, one only needs to read the newspapers or see the news on TV. Or if you are of the scholarly type, just read one of good ole Shakespeare's tragedies.

Another thing, if there's something that Junot can't cover on this book is his hatred for dominican culture, portraying us as if we were the ones to invent caudillism, machism or racism in Latin America, when the truth is that the DR is perhaps the only country on the continent where the aforementioned evils have impacted the less on its social life (well, maybe not with machism, with all the cases of violence against women out there, but that's another story altogether).

Lautaro what in this book made you think Diaz considers Dominican's to be the creators of all these things? If Diaz really thought that then he would be thinking very highly of Dominicans to have invented realities that have existed forever and a day. The only thing categorically hated on in the book is Trujillo. Everything else, whether our machismo, our vulgarity, our language, our religion & superstition...it all gets the bittersweet humorous treatment, showing good and bad. Even the narrator is a machista, but a charming machista.

So scandalous a statement I'm forced to ask if you actually read this

Oh yeah? What about Oscar's sis' exclaiming (after her brother's tragic demise) that every dominican is a trujillito? or Junot himself saying on some press interviews over here that "dominican racism prepared him for the one he would experience on the States", as if we were the creators of the cursed one drop rule? Give me a break!!

So those statements mean Junot Diaz thinks Dominicans created these things? As for the fictional character's statement if you don't see the humorous insight contained in it perhaps you've read it in the wrong spirit. This very forum is overflowing with trujillitos, and believe me I don't mean only those among us who happen to be on the right

As for Diaz's own statement the man is speaking of his own biography...do you know for a fact he didn't experience racism in DR? Is that somehow outside the realm of the probable? And again if he claims he was ready for US racism because he experienced it in DR, does that now translate into him saying Dominicans are the source of racism

Anyway Laut you are of course free to seriously dislike the book but this business about Diaz ascribing the source of all evils to be DR is bizarre.

Oh I know about his "incident" on one of high class nightclubs of the capital, but that doesn't entitle him to compare us with, perhaps, the most racist nation on the history of humanity. Heck, even his racist majesty, Adolf Hitler, confessed the fact that he learned all his racists views from the american eugeneticists. What does that tell you? There's a fine line between the resentment that every inmigrant feels for the society that exiled him/her and open hatred, and IMHO, Junot have surpassed that line by wide margin, my friend.

Laut I think in both the cases of Diaz and Hitler you need to wonder whether hyperbole was being employed. It isn't wise to take either literature or propaganda so literally. Coincidentally Diaz himself, in the Wao book and interviews, has made the humorous comparison between the totalitarian nature of novelists and dictators, and their intersection in the sphere of language.

The line between bittersweet sentiment and hatred is not so fine at all if you ask me. Compare literature of German Holocaust exiles and Dominican immigrants. Diaz's descriptions of both nations, attention to DR history, and equating the every day lives of his Dominican characters with elements of Engish lit. canon don't seem hateful to me. Diaz, like a lot of us lil' trujillitos and Dominicans at large, may be prone to temper and moments of harsh judgment about DR's situations. Still when a man spends ten years writing a book all about recent Dominican history, a book that unequivocally says 'the unfolding Dominican dramas are every bit as universal and human as Shakespeare and James Joyce, and as fantastic as Tolkien and Marvel'.... this is hate?