The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Although I don't talk very much in class, I really agreed with everything that was said in class on Tuesday.  Like the fact that being deprived of masculinity and power was a key concept of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  It was so interesting to me to find out about the Dominican culture and what the women and men see as attractive and powerful compared to my own opinions of how I see these same things.  In this book, Diaz really places emphasis on gender and how it's such an important part of being from the Dominican and being a male and how being all maucho man is so important in their culture.  It's very clear in the book that Oscar lacks many qualities that one "should" have to be considered a strong, successful Dominican man.  For example, he is not very violent and would never fight anyone and is kind of a nerdy outcast because of these reasons.  I can kind of relate to Oscar on that nerdy, outcast level and sympathize with him and because of this I found his character to be my favorite of all the characters in the book.  I really enjoyed reading this book and saw characteristics in Oscar, even though he is a man, which are a lot like myself so it was cool to find out more about his character's strengths and weaknesses as I read on.  I was very happy to see that Oscar finally found that special love that made him feel more like a man at the end of the novel.  I found Oscar's desire to find that one special woman very admirable and more respectable than sleeping with a different woman all the time until he found the right one.  I think we could all agree that we would find a man like Oscar more "masculine" in real life than we would find a man like Yunior for example, or at least I know I would.