Dead Souls

While most people may remember Nikolai Gogol for his surreal short stories, this novel by him is just as laugh out loud funny as those stories.  Our hero, Chichikov (as the author often refers to him) is a stranger in town and on a mission to purchase dead muzhiks from Russian land owners.  They are of little use to the owners and only a tax liability, while he will be considered a rich man until the next census, as wealth in this time of Russia's history is based on number of acres and number of souls owned.

Gogol has an amazing writing ability, telling as much in one sentence as some authors need entire books to explain.  He often interrupts his own narration to compliment the reader, or apologize to his characters, in a very unintrusive way.

The award winning translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky permit the reader to believe they are enjoying what the author intended and not what they would have written instead of Gogol.  Sadly, Gogol did not complete the second part of this book.   The translators explain that Gogol burned two different endings and the manuscript they used for this translation has illegible words, made up words and complete chapters and pages missing. Because of this, the second part tends to jump around and while easy to follow and catch up in the life of our hero, it left this reader sometimes confused and looking for explanations - and the completion to the very last sentence!

If you are a fan of 19th century Russian literature written with humor and bite, add this book to your pile.  You won't be disappointed.

Nausea rating:  None!  Just wonderful!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Wao! Or should I say wow! Without giving too much away, I will say that the main character, Oscar, is called Wao as a joke. In fact, Oscar is picked on a lot growing up, but this book is not really about that after all.

Junot Diaz has written a book about family and how, even though we try to deny it, we are tied and bound to family through their past and our future. Okay, sounds corny, but that is what the book is really about.

It follows the brief, maybe not so wondrous life of Oscar, but we also follow his mother, sister and family friend. All these people are intertwined, yet each person's story is very separate and personal and when I was done reading this book, I too felt connected to all these people in my own separate way.

Be ready to brush up on your Spanish as well. As Dominicans, these characters use a lot of it. Some I knew, some not - and how it was used in context didn't always help either. But don't let that discourage you. It was still very readable and the Spanish only helped to make me feel as if I was part of this family.

This book also has lots of footnotes, and not to translate any of the language throughout the book. Diaz uses footnotes to share historical facts about characters and locations, but as if the author has interrupted himself in telling a story to get a fact across. Since they are all written in the same tone and style of the narrator, they could have easily been made just part of the story itself instead of the sometime two page long interruption of narration.

Diaz won the the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and it was well deserved. He writes with feeling and emotion, but not cliched or stagnant and when it's all down and over, and you find out why Oscar's life was so brief and wondrous, you want to just hold the book close to you and tell Oscar it's all going to be alright.

Nausea rating: Mildly - for violence and sense of pain and loss