The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [Hardcover]

Junot Diaz (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 6, 2007

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

D’az immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

Editorial Reviews

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

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Matthew SharpeAreader might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather. However, Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. Even the presumed reader shape-shifts in the estimation of its in-your-face narrator, who addresses us variously as folks, you folks, conspiracy-minded-fools, Negro, Nigger and plataneros. So while Diaz assumes in his reader the same considerable degree of multicultural erudition he himself possesses—offering no gloss on his many un-italicized Spanish words and expressions (thus beautifully dramatizing how linguistic borders, like national ones, are porous), or on his plethora of genre and canonical literary allusions—he does helpfully footnote aspects of Dominican history, especially those concerning the bloody 30-year reign of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The later Oscar chapters lack the linguistic brio of the others, and there are exposition-clogged passages that read like summaries of a longer narrative, but mostly this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown and The Sleeping Father. He teaches at Wesleyan University.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (September 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489580
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489587
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (741 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#93 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#93 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

623 of 659 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "I did all I could and it still wasn't enough." September 29, 2007

By Gregory Baird VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"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 Read more ›

237 of 266 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Be patient, it warms up February 3, 2008

By D. Kanigan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The story opens by exploring the life of a Oscar, a promising young Dominican child growing up in New Jersey who morphs into an overweight, unpopular way-out-there nerd who is desperate to lose his virginity. The story goes on to explore the lives of Oscar, Oscar's mother (orphaned, faced class & race discrimination, unrequited love, assault), sister (angst to leave Mother's persistent negativism and see the world) and Mother's family (persecuted by Dictator). The first half of the book was challenging to read as the author uses footnotes and many Spanish language phrases that are not translated (and frustratingly so...and perhaps herein lies the not-so subliminal message to me that I need to learn Spanish). These language challenges, coupled with the weaving back and forth from the present to the past and between multiple characters made the storyline challenging to follow and impacted my enjoyment of the story. That being said, I appreciated author's integration of the political, social and economic history of the Dominican Republic and how the environment shaped many of the lives of the generations who migrated to the U.S. Hang in there as the book warms up at p. 150 and beyond where the main characters develop very nicely.

132 of 154 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wao as in WOW! October 17, 2007

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Family's History of the Dominican Republic January 8, 2008

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I loved Diaz's short story collection Drown, and like almost everyone else who read it, have been eagerly waiting years for his next book. Now, something like a decade later, Diaz brings a character from that collection (Yunior) back to narrate the family history of his Rutgers roommate Oscar (who is also the brother of Yunior's sometime girlfriend). This tale begins with Oscar's grandfather and ends up encompassing quite a bit of the modern history of the Dominican Republic. And although the story hopscotches back and forth in time and location quite a bit, Diaz has complete command of his narrative.

To be fair, sometimes the story feels more like "A People's History of the Dominican Republic." than a novel about a geeky kid from New Jersey. Not that this is a bad thing -- Diaz manages to get at the political, economic, and psychological forces that brought so many Dominican immigrants to the U.S . over the last fifty years via captivating and dextrous prose. The dominant theme of this multigenerational story is the "fuku" (curse) Oscar's family lives under. (Of course, as Yunior points out, every Dominican family believes itself to be cursed by the fuku americanus, a curse brought by European colonialists which has turned the Caribbean Eden into a despotic prison to be escaped.)s The fuku first hits Oscar's grandfather, an upper-class doctor undone by the rise of the Trujillo thugocracy (equal to that of Saddam Hussein in horror inflicted on its subjects). His daughter (Oscar's mother) faces her own tragedy due to the fuku, and is the bridge between life in the D.R. and life in America, as she escapes to New York. Her children, Oscar and Lola, represent the generation born and bred in the U.S. -- both connected to, and apart from their Dominican heritage....

The story thus enables Diaz to examine how nationality, culture, and language become more and more blended over generations (non-Spanish speakers should note that the book is full of untranslated Spanish words and phrases, which can be a little frustrating at times). The segments of the book set in the D.R. under the Trujillo regime tend to be a great deal more compelling than the contemporary storyline. The story of Oscar's mother's childhood and teen years are far more colorful and dramatic than the on-again, off-again romance between Yunior and Oscar's sister Lola, and are definitely more interesting than Oscar's own geeky problems. Fat, obsessive, and devoid of social skills, Oscar makes it hard for people (including the reader) to sympathize with him and his dual dreams of becoming the "Dominican Tolkein" and losing his virginity. The final section of the book, in which Oscar pursues love with the trademark oblivious obsession that has made him an outcast, is pretty much straightforward classical doomed love, and thus the least interesting and convincing.

The overall effect of the book is a good deal more sad and depressing than I had expected. Although the title and opening chapter alert the reader to the brevity of Oscar's life, for some reason, I hadn't expected it to unfold quite as pathetically and tragically as it does. Similar tragedies unfold in the previous generations, and by the end of the book, there is little consolation of any kind to be found. Diaz writes with so much compassion for his characters that one would be hard pressed not to be affected. However, the sexual themes that pervade all the storylines act as somewhat of a life-affirming counterbalance to all the death and disappointment. And above all, there is the sheer exuberance and dexterity of the prose, which makes the book well worth reading from a purely stylistic or technical perspective. Not exactly a masterpiece, but well worth reading. Read more ›