Reflection of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

There are many different elements of this novel that make it an interesting story to read. One of the most discussed issues in class was the style of writing that the author employed. A large part of this story was written in Spanish. Personally, I enrolled in two years of Spanish during high school. So, I was not completely lost when it came to the Spanish in this book. There was a large majority of it though that I could not understand. At first, this really irritated me. Never in my life have I encountered this type of obstacle in reading a book. Even after finishing the story, I would have to say that the Spanish still makes me a little uneasy. I feel as if I have missed out on a crucial part of the story by not understanding it. At the same time, my lack of understanding contributues to the lesson that I can gather from the book. Life is not always clearly understandable, just as the lives of Oscar and Lola were. The process of reading this story is the same way. Also, Diaz forces his readers to truely examine the personalities of the characters and the reasons behind their behaviors, especially because the reader can't always understand their speech. For example, the reader cannot always comprehend what Oscar and Lola's mother is saying to her children. We gather the impression that she is distressed and very unhappy, but we do not know exactly how she expresses these em0tions. We gather from reading the reflections of other characters that her anger and frustration is warranted, and we form our own opinions from here.

I think that this was a very good book to include in this class. Honestly, I have never had to work this hard to try to understand a story. In the end, I think that this was the lesson I was meant to learn all along. Reading requires intense effort. There will be times that I won't completely understand something that I've read. This is acceptable.