February Book Club Meet-up: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The theme for February will be the Dominican Republic (or the Caribbean), we will be reading
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, and we will be eating at a Dominican or other restaurant with Caribbean cuisine in SF, exact location TBD. This won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize book and has been requested by a few members. I was waiting until it came out in paperback to read it for the book club.

I am accepting recommendations for restaurants. (Restaurant must be large enough to accommodate a large group, not be so crowded that they are fussy about exact group size and arrival timing, they should take reservations, and meal prices should be on the less expensive side.)

Reviews on the book

Reviewers agree that Junot D’az's first novel was well worth the 11-year wait. D’az established his reputation with Drown (1996), a collection of short stories that drew widespread praise. With The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, D’az has cemented his place in the literary stratosphere. He garners admiration for the "slangy and kinetic energy of his prose" (New York Times), as well as for the way he hop scotches between high- and lowbrow culture and ties together Dominican and American history (and the problems therein). Some critics cite a distracting (mysterious) narrator, too many digressions, and a difficult narrative structure. Despite these minor flaws, fans of literary fiction should dive right in.
-Bookmarks Magazine

Díaz's gutsy short story collection Drown (1996) made the young Dominican American a literary star. Readers who have had to wait a decade for his first novel are now spectacularly rewarded. Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, he has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Díaz's besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fukú, the curse unleashed when Europeans arrived on Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby ghetto nerd Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience at the center of this whirlwind tale. Writing in a combustible mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow. And his characters—Oscar, the hopeless romantic; Lola, his no-nonsense sister; their heartbroken mother; and the irresistible homeboy narrator—cling to life with the magical strength of superheroes, yet how vibrantly human they are. Propelled by compassion, Díaz's novel is intrepid and radiant.
-Booklist

“Funny, street-smart and keenly observed…An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.”
—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

“Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific...That Díaz’s novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator’s] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth’s Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is the just word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.”
—Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astoundingly great.”
—Lev Grossman, Time

“Terrific...High-energy...It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.”
—Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly