Two books reviews ....

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
© 2009, rating: ***

Pygmy is the lastest offering from the totally screwed up mind of Chuck Palahniuk. This is only the third book that I've read by him, and it did have a different feel to it than the previous two. Pygmy is the story of a teenager from an unnamed totalitarian state who travels to the American midwest as a terrorist in a plot called "Operation Havoc". No, I am not kidding. While in the midwest, he has to do what he can to fit in with his host family (comprised of "host cow father", "chicken mother", "pig-dog brother", and most importantly, "cat sister") while carrying out his subversive plan.

I bought this book for my boyfriend for his birthday and told him that I wanted to read it after he was finished. He liked it, me ... not so much. So I'm glad I didn't buy it for me. There are some scenes that are very funny, like when Pygmy tries to make sense of school dances, church ceremonies and spelling bees. I also thought that the interspersion of Pygmy's terrible experiences in his home country with those in America were also interesting in the parallels and the ways that they were different.

I think that this book failed in two ways - the first was the language. It is written in an odd style of pidgin english. For instance, in the chapter about the school dance, one of the sentences reads, "Occasional male student approach female, request mutual gyrate to demonstrate adequate reproductive partner, fast gyrate to display no cripple. No genetic defect to bequeath offspring." The entire book was like that ... it was a little like reading Chaucer in Middle English; the first few chapters were difficult, but my mind did get into the rhythm of it.

The second place this book failed was the ending. Holy crap it was silly, especially considering the kind of story Palahniuk was trying to tell. Perhaps it would work on the big screen, but it was not a fitting end to this story.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
© 2007, rating: ***

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his multigenerational family about American immigrants from the Dominican Republic. The book is entitled The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the majority of the book is actually about his family members; the sections about Oscar are relatively brief. In fact, if there is any main character in this story, it is the fuku, the curse that follows the De Leon family through the generations.

Oscar's grandfather Abelard supposedly said A Bad Thing about Trujillo - an offense punishable by death during the Trujillo dictatorship in the D.R. From then on out, a fuku followed his family, preying upon each generation one by one. We as readers hear about Oscar, his sister Lola (in her voice), Lola's boyfriend Yunior (in his voice), his mother Beli and his grandfather Abelard in alternating chapters in the story.

In the beginning, I found Oscar a compelling character. An "anti-Dominican Dominican", he is overweight and in love with "the genres" - sci fi, fantasy, role-playing games. He has few friends, and no girlfriends, but when he falls in love, he loves with all of his heart. However, as the book goes and on we see more and more of Oscar from the viewpoints of other people, I found him to be more and more irritating in a way - though perhaps that is a sign of good writing, and I was seeing Oscar through the eyes of Yunior. Truthfully, the most compelling character for me was Lola, and her portions of the story were briefest of all.

I wanted to like this book very much - it was our book club selection for this month and I was really looking forward to it. Where the book fails for me is not so much in the story telling but in the writing. I actually quite liked the style of the writing, but Diaz intersperses a lot of spanish into his text with no translations. While it gives the story greater realism, it is distracting and annoying for those who don't speak spanish. Also, since much of it is slang, the online translators don't do much. Additionally, Diaz includes lengthy footnotes about the history of the Dominican Republic as background information for those that don't know. I found the foot notes also to be a distraction ... which is too bad, since there were some funny bits tucked away in there. Finally, it takes a long time before you figure out who the narrator of most of the story is and how it came to be. When the narration begins to switch all over the place, it was distracting to try and figure out who was telling which portions of the story - which is important, because there are biases in the voices of the narrators.

So all in all .... three stars. I'm not sorry I read it, but it will likely be one of my most disappointing books of the year. We will be discussing this book in book club tomorrow and maybe I'll like it better when we are done.