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A lot of people seem to either hate or love this book. Most people get irritated with misleading title, the hard-to-follow narration/storyline, but mostly with the eclectic use of spanglish that is scattered throughout the book and with no footnote, i might add!!!

In an interview, Junot Diaz said that he offered up the Spanish without translation because he wanted to give English readers an idea of the immigrant experience. The spanish in this book reflects the immigrant experience. The alienation from a comprehensive control is just one of the fun themes.

The book is an explanation for Oscar, a Dominican-American boy who does not fit either title. Well, he’s not American because he’s Dominican. And he’s certainly not Dominican, because just look at him! The general male stereotype for Dominican males was, well,

this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands. Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it.� Oscar describes himself: “the fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horriblesnes of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Or like the fat blackish kid in Beto Hernandez’s Palomar:

(this is a creepy Daniel Clowes comic called "The Sensual Santa" to give you an idea)

In contrast, Oscar (as well as his entire family) end up being at war with the actual creepy man, the ultimate Dominican stereotype, the sex fiend, Trujillo:

hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy. (Like keeping the Ring from Sauron.) If you think the average Dominican guy's bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass; if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world's first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was)

What’s funny is that this is a book about sex. It is a book about the magic of sex and it’s object, how much it is saved up for in the minds of men who think only about sex, how much it can dominate culture, how much people can wear it and how much it can control. But if you think sex is all-powerful, imagine the people who epitomize it. This is an adventure into the man who believed sex was the be-all, end-all.

What a lot of people fail to realize in this unconventional storytelling, is that the story is very much unconventional as well. Here, the hero is a disenchanted, role-playing, lonely-hearted loser whose whole life has been a plague of his own people telling him he’s not one of them, and the people whose land he is in rejecting him because he is just so weird and ugly. The thing is, Diaz harnesses Oscar between the two cultures—this is done with a balance between the mystical and the fantastical.

The book is a history of life within the Trujillo regime through the context of one family (Oscar’s). The idea of Trujillo being more than human, an actual demon, whom if you cross curses your family for all existence is heavy. This kind of curse is known as the fuku. It dominates. It’s the kind of magical realism that Latin American writers are known for. And it is brilliant. But America doesn’t� have magically real aspects to our society, all mysticism is waylaid on the fringe. Oscar’s story is a translation into the next best thing;

See, the book dabbles with magical realism but from the closest perspective we have of that in our culture, fantasy games. Oscar is emphatic about the Lord of the Rings, about Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy games galore. A lot of the allusions that are made deal with epic characters in these fantasies. In essence, his psyche remains Dominican, by the standard that his life is consumed by this mystic element. But nevertheless, he is still in America. He is still in the plain and ordinary life that only filters magic through games and television.

The book is about a kid alienated by two cultures who is really smart and affable, but unattractive and clingy. An affection starved derelict of the most erotically affectionate people on the planet.

He's get everything going the wrong way for him except for the fact that he is Dominican, but the mere fact that he is Dominican instantiates this curse, the magically real aspect of his life rather than the American fantasy. The fuku.

it is alienating to not know certain words or terms, like the many sci-fi references he makes throughout the book, but no more alienating than old literary references or presumptuous historical ones that so many classic writers do to augment their story. This is an original version of that same irritating pretentious alienation, and it is beautiful. because it forces you to go out your realm of ordinary thought and either research or imagine.

ah man, this isn't a very good review. I'll finish this later.