The Eye of Sauron

It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves.

Michiko Kakutani on Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

I guess this is why she gets paid the big big bucks to review books and I don't. She's prettty much summed what impressed me so much about the book which is how seamlessly Diaz manages to move from the big picture (the grand narrative of history to the small picture) the micro view and more importantly connect the two without privileging one over the other.

The way Trujillo dominates the lives of their characters makes me think of Park Chung Hee and the conflicted place he must hold in the psyche of many Koreans. On one hand, he's the father of modern Korea (try getting my father to say anything bad about him) and arguably the reason South Korea is not a third world country today, but at the same time a pretty damn Trujilloish dictator in his own right. Ironically, I didn't immediately think of the dictator to the North like the reviewer in the Voice did, calling Trujillio, the DR's very own Kim Jong Il. But I guess its easy to forget that it took some time for democratic elections to take root on the American client side of Korea too.