("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao")

I had pretty high hopes for Junot Diaz and the famed geek elements in the novel, but I just can't find my groove with Latin (American) writers. Obsession with manhood is already alienating, but to watch likable female characters going through disastrous love affairs one after another as if it were all preordained is just too much.

• Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
• half Haitian half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe,
• The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Or like the fat blackish kid in Beto Hernández’s Palomar. Jesus Christ, he whispered. I’m a Morlock.
• all she did when she picked him up was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they’d gone, building another one of their word-scrapers.
• I do not move so precipitously. He paused and then sighed. In other words, I didn’t even get her scarf off.
• The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness.
• My mother was one of the tallest women in Paterson, and her anger was just as tall. It pincered you in its long arms,
• And if I could have I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face,
• It went up in a flash, like gasoline, like a stupid hope, and if I hadn’t thrown it in the sink it would have taken my hand. The smell was horrible, like all of the chemicals from all the factories in Elizabeth. That was when she slapped at me, when I struck her hand and she snatched it back, like I was the fire.
• and my disappointment would grind against some organ that was very soft and tender.
• the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton.
• She stood like she was her own best thing
• Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.
• (To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.)
• the sad airs of a man long accustomed to the spectacular demolition of dreams.