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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao |  | Author: Junot Díaz
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Seller: thriftit
Rating:  488 reviews
Sales Rank: 549
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 1594483299
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594483295
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2007: It's been 11 years since Junot Díaz's critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf--you won't be disappointed. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Product Description
The most talked aboutand praisedfirst novel of 2007, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd whofrom the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukúa curse that has haunted Oscars family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<./I> opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevereand risk it allin the name of love.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 488
 "I did all I could and it still wasn't enough." September 29, 2007
Gregory Baird (New York, NY)
469 out of 494 found this review helpful
"You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest."
Meet Oscar de León. Once upon a time, in elementary school, Oscar was a slick Dominican kid who seemed to have a typical life ahead of him. Then, around the time he hit puberty, Oscar gained a whole lot of weight, became awkward both physically and socially, and got deeply interested in things that made him an outcast among his peers (sci-fi novels, comics, Dungeons & Dragons, writing novels, etc.). A particularly unfortunate Dr. Who Halloween costume earns him the nickname Oscar Wao for the costume's resemblance to another Oscar: playwright Oscar Wilde (Wao being a Dominican spin on the surname). His few friends are embarrassed by him, girls want nothing to do with him, and everywhere he goes Oscar finds nothing but derision and hostility. And he's not the only person in his family suffering through life: his mother, a former beauty, has been ravaged by illness, bad love affairs, and worry regarding her two children; and his sister Lola, another intense beauty, has been cursed with a nomadic soul and her mother's poor taste in men.
The kicker about the de León family? They just may be the victims of a bona fide curse (a particularly nasty one at that, called a fukú) as a result of their history with Rafael Trujillo, a former dictator of the Dominican Republic renowned for his brutality, and whose enemies uniformly met with disastrous ends one way or another (historical details about Trujillo and the history of his reign are scattered throughout the novel, a tidbit that may turn some off of the book, but rest assured that Díaz is so utterly entertaining a writer that they are a joy to read). The de Leóns are on a collision course with disaster, but can they break the curse before it's too late?
"you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."
Embroiled in all this mess is Yunior, our primary narrator and Oscar's former college roommate (not to mention the philandering ex-boyfriend of Lola, the novel's other narrator), whose experiences with the de León clan will haunt him for the rest of his life. His attempts to help Oscar become more popular fail, as do his tries to escape Oscar's grasp. "These days," he remarks at one point, "I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?"
Oscar is far and away the most poignant character to come along in a great long while; in my book he's every bit as memorable as Ignatius J. Reilly, Holden Caulfield, Randall Patrick McMurphy, and other literary giants. Furthermore, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is a phenomenal novel that is hysterical, hypnotic, heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal parts (and quite often at the same time). The plot is a madcap high-wire act balanced with astonishing dexterity by Junot Díaz. If he has a misstep it is in the denouement, which is rather sudden and slightly lacking in clarity for an otherwise thorough novel. Nonetheless, I loved, loved, loved this book. And, naturally, I highly recommend it.
Grade: A
Wao as in WOW! October 17, 2007
Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA)
92 out of 106 found this review helpful
Dude can write. In fact, this book is one of the most original that I've come across in a long time.
Like the layers of an onion, Diaz peels back the layers of years to reveal the back history of Oscar and his sister Lola. And what a history it is! The Banana Curtain is unveiled and the horrors of Trujillo -- the raging narcissist and despoiler of women -- are unflinchingly revealed, creating shudders of revulsion and flashes of understanding in this reader.
Junot Diaz creates a language and a tempo unlike any I've read before, peppered with Spanish colloquialisms, street talk, and video game terminology. Somehow, though, it works -- and works beautifully -- even if you don't know an "hola" from an "adios" or have never played a video game in your life (like this reader.)
I will not soon forget Oscar Wao, the 300+ pound romantic, Lola, Yunior, or his mother and the Gangster and his ill-fated grandparents. The book is compulsively readable. For all of those who say that "the novel is dead", I say: read Junot Diaz.
Great Story - but requires Multi-Lingual ability October 28, 2008
Lisa Shea
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
The most important thing to know about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is that it is a MULTI language book. Large portions of it are written in Spanish. There are also numerous other phrases and situations lifted from a number of sci-fi books, anime, manga, which form a language in and of themselves. You either need to know all of these worlds thoroughly to understand the book, or you need to have a "cliff notes" guide next to you and go back and forth between the book you're reading and the explanation of what the chapter actually meant.
The book is told from a number of points of view - Oscar, his sister Lola, his mother, even his grandmother and more. Each person tells a portion of the story from their own point of view and fills in more of the storyline. Oscar is an obese man of Dominican descent who takes refuge in a world of sci-fi and fantasy. He is picked on for his size and his depression and retreat make up the majority of this story. What makes up the other part is the history of the Dominican Republic. With many books you read the story and at the end all you've learned is about those fake characters and their lives. With this book, you really learn a lot about the Dominican Republic - something that most of us probably know nothing at all about. I give the book a lot of credit for all of the research and information it presents in a fun, enjoyable way. The use of footnotes to do it is a bit stilting at time, but it still is enriching to learn the history.
I really did enjoy the book greatly - but I also took six years of Spanish. I could understand what it was saying. I think the average non-Spanish speaker who is reading along about Beli working in a restaurant and hitting the phrase, "Oye, paraguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre?" are going to be sort of lost. I could see if they tossed in one-word in context words such as "Adios, see you later my friend!" However, the book goes FAR beyond that and often you need to know what the words mean to understand what is going on. There really should have been footnotes with translations - there are certainly enough footnotes with less important things story-wise.
In the same way, you miss a lot of the storyline if you haven't read certain books. For example, Oscar often speaks in Dune-language. He says at one point his grandmother "tried to use the Voice" on him. This is a power of the Bene Gesserit in Dune, where they could subtly control someone's actions by speaking in a certain way to them. In another part he is afraid, and starts quoting "Fear is the mind killer" which is the Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear". The whole litany gives a mental environment for handling fear, which the reader is expected to know and understand.
More people might get the Lord of the Rings references which are scattered around quite a lot, given the recent popularity of those movies. One woman is "ageless, the family's very own Galadriel," i.e. the Elven beauty from Lothlorien. Speaking of Lothlorien, another section of the book talks about how a woman "who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Bani her own personal Lothlorien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye." There's a lot of Lord of the Rings mythology wrapped up in that sentence that a non-LOTR reader would miss. Even more meaningful, when Oscar first read Lord of the Rings he choked at the line "and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls" which represents an entire area of sociological discussion about how Tolkien handled dark skinned people.
This type of situation is everywhere. There are lines from Akira. Commentary from Star Wars. Lots of quick one-line references that bring with them a wealth of meaning, but if you don't have that background of literature in your history, you will miss what he's trying to say. I was lucky in that I am a huge sci-fi buff and also love anime, so I got a lot of those references, but it really makes me wonder 1) what I still might have missed and 2) how much others who have not read all these things are going to miss. Again, the book really needs a CliffNotes to go with it, so you can see what all the references meant in the chapter you just finished.
I didn't find any websites that do this type of breakdown, so maybe I should start one up! It really is needed, to get the full understanding of the plot and subtle meaning in what is being said.
Well recommended if you have that Spanish language background and sci-fi fantasy understanding. If you go into this without understanding Spanish and not having read any sci-fi, you're going to run into a *lot* you are confused by. You can either just accept that is going to happen or have a web browser nearby to help you translate.
The Stern Librarian chooses her favorite of 2007 January 24, 2008
D. N. Stone (Stamford, CT United States)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The Stern Librarian felt initially, but was not entirely certain, that this was her favorite novel of 2007, so she sat on her review for some time to see how things settled. I suppose I feared that Diaz's first novel was just a clever pastiche of David Foster Wallace (the detailed, page-eating footnotes), Jeffrey Eugenides (the curse-driven, multi-generational immigrant saga), Michael Chabon (the disorienting, exhilarating effect when language from another genre--comic books for Chabon and Tolkien fantasy for Diaz--is put to service in literature) and John Kennedy Toole (the grossly overweight protagonist whose body hides a fragile, comic soul). And, yes, all of these writers clearly have influenced Diaz, but his novel is something completely new and original, which has brought to life for me the Dominican people, their nation and their collective curse--an American-supported dictator who could makes immortal dark wizards quake. Oscar's own tale of love deferred is the main event, but it is the stories of the women in this book I will never forget. The Stern Librarian (I am the Eye of Sauron of the Stacks).
the funniest, sweetest book of the year September 18, 2007
Richard Cumming (the heartland)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
Wow, Junot Diaz is a force! I can't remember the last time I loved a book this much. Oscar Wao is a Dominican fanboy nerd living in New Jersey. He's crazy about women but they won't give him the time of day. Even when he visits the Dominican Republic the women look the other way.
Oscar fancies himself to be a fantasy writer. He loves JRR Tolkien, comic books, etc. He's that sweet, fat, intellectual dweeb who deserves love but doesn't know how to get it.
Diaz has long, hysterical footnotes that give readers a pocket history of the infamous regime of the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Oscar's mom and sister are incredible characters.
This book will make your heart burst. It's that good.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 488
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