The thoughtful first:
Powells.com interview with Diaz: "That's more a product of very hard work than any skill. Certainly I wanted that voice to come off as fluid, but I'm sure there are people out there for whom this stuff comes easy. For me, this is the product of thirty rewrites."
LA Times review: "People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer."
Really, it's a love novel."
Slate.com interview with Diaz: "And as a footnote: No one can write a straightforward political novel about the Trujillato and capture its phantasmagorical power. That's another reason I had to go hard-core nerd. Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillato cannot be accessed, eludes our 'modern' minds. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It we cannot see."
NYTBR (A. O. Scott): "Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar’s coming-of-age is in some ways the book’s thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus."
And some not-so-thoughtful, but maybe worth reading for discussion's sake:
New York Times (Kakutani)
Salon.com (Roland Kelts)
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