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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Paperback – September 2, 2008

by Junot Díaz (Author)

3,873 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year

One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from 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 fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s 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 opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

Print length

339 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Riverhead Books
Publication date

September 2, 2008
Dimensions

5.15 x 1 x 7.9 inches
ISBN-10

1594483299
ISBN-13

978-1594483295
Lexile measure

1010L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose. . . A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." —New York Magazine

"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest." —Time

"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all." —The Boston Globe

"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself." —Los Angeles Times

"Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . . In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak." —Esquire

"The Dominican Republic [Díaz] portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander. Díaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel and boom!—it's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow." —The Washington Post Book World

"Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread." —Entertainment Weekly

"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we are—might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two." —Newsweek

"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories." —USA Today

"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz." —Publishers Weekly

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; This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, Islandborn. 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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; Reprint edition (September 2, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 339 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594483299
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594483295
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 1 x 7.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12 in Hispanic American Literature & Fiction
- #62 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #693 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3,873 ratings

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Junot Díaz

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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.

Customer reviews

5 star		67%
4 star		16%
3 star		8%
2 star		4%
1 star		5%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Great Story - but requires Multi-Lingual ability

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 28, 2008

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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.

25 people found this helpful

Wish I hadn’t read it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 21, 2022

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The book itself was a good quality publication. The story however left me wishing I had never read it. Mostly because there are references and descriptions of brutal violence throughout that left me with a mild form of ptsd. If that kinda thing doesn't bother you and you are interested in South American politics and disfuncional family dynamics then you’ll probably enjoy it. The writing style is very conversational, like an internal dialogue. Ultimately tho it left me wanting.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 11, 2016

Verified Purchase

I was wary of Díaz and "Oscar Wao," since "Pulitzer" often means middlebrow, pandering and/or forgettable writing, not art. But this is literary art, I was happy to find. Junot Diaz, far from patronizing the reader as do most middlebrows, throws everything he's got at us, all his talents, his knowledge of life, his truths about the way people behave, and also what I suspect is every kind and level of communication of which he's capable, from dazzling, poetic turns of phrase to street talk with all its double negatives and vulgarisms. Often there is great variety of this sort in a single sentence, which can make for a dizzying trip but an exhilarating one, too. There are many complaints among the reviews here about his insistence on peppering his narrative (and dialogue) with untranslated Spanish and what must be Dominican slang. I am sure that a highly intelligent and crafty a writer as Díaz has considered how this shuts out us exclusive Anglophones but went ahead and did it anyway. And we can only guess why, but maybe to do less would have seemed too compromising to his aims. Maybe reducing the novel to English exclusively, or to footnoted Spanish (or with a glossary at the end) would have made it feel compromised; maybe Hispanics or Dominicans were his primary audience; maybe he just wanted to write the way he thought, and limited readers be damned. I once counted 35 words in Beckett's novella, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women" that not only were unknown to me but most of which could be found only in the most esoteric or specialized of dictionaries; and yet I loved the decorativeness of that arcana, the way they contributed to the arch music of the book. How could I fault Junot Díaz when the full palette of his verbal mix contributed to the richness of the narrative, and what must comprise Dominican-American identity?
I was going to penalize Díaz one star for this bilingual conceit, since it was annoying not to have at least a glossary, but seeing that the consensus for this novel is much lower than I expected I'm waiving the criticism. It should be an author's right to limit his audience as much as he wants, and if implicitly the book is meant for other Dominicanos, with the rest of us as a secondary audience, fine. I'm happy to eavesdrop on a conversation not meant primarily for me. (The doubtless predominantly Anglo Pulitzer committee were equally accommodating and understood his writer's prerogative.)
Since I'm spending so much energy here with this issue, let me just say that what made the book outstanding was the invention of the main character, Oscar, a more sympathic and hilarious character I haven't seen in a while. A morbidly obese sci-fi/nerd writer from Paterson, New Jersey who speaks with anachronistic, self-effacing elegance, a kind of modern-day Quixote in his romanticism, who is foredoomed to ultimate, but poignant, failure. (While in high school he answers the home phone, "De Léon residence. How may I direct your call?" According to his sister that's one reason everybody hated him) For more details, allow me to defer to Gregory Baird's excellent five-star summary of the virtues of the novel and the winning characterization of its protagonist. (He faults the denoument as being "slightly lacking in clarity," a fault I didn't find, however. I found it not only clear but pitch-perfect, for all that) There are several glimpses of erudition (such as the distinct separation between town and country in the Dominican Republic being described as "Corbusian") which leads me to suspect that Diaz has resources he has yet to exploit. I look forward to a lot more of those resources being unraveled in future works.

16 people found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

J. Smith

Poorly written female characters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

What a disappointment after all the great reviews. Really found the way young girls are described so sexually hard to stomach. Page after page of descriptions of young teens with perfect arses and plump boobs. And even Oscar’s main motivation is trying to bed girls.

I’m no prude and love boobs as much as the next reader, but the book falls into the classic trope of male writers who can’t write women without describing how they look naked. Even when describing female children. Try and describe any of the characters without mentioning sex or how they look, and you’ll struggle to write a paragraph. They’re all quite one dimensional.

I also find books that lapse into another language faux intellectual - it doesn’t really add to the narrative but does exclude anyone without a pretty decent grasp of Spanish.

22 people found this helpful

Harry Hamill

A Wild and Colourful Ride

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 6, 2021

Verified Purchase

This novel kept me engaged to the end. The writing is vigorous and at times pretty raw. It presents a terrifying picture of the Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic but with a ruthlessly comic viewpoint.
The outsider hero is obsessed by fantasy fiction and comic books and the story unfolds through the eyes of the vividly drawn characters like a cartoon strip by George Grosz.
For me the final denouement was a little weak though you could argue the same about many of Dickens’ novels so perhaps not such a bad thing. It didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the book’s energy and colour. It also provides a crash course in Spanish. Keep a dictionary to hand or read on Kindle.

Paul

Tremendous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 4, 2018

Verified Purchase

An absolutely tremendous book which follows the lives of three generations of an immigrant family, pre- and post-emigration. It is obvious Diaz is writing about something he knows, something he has lived himself, even down to the geeky references to sci-fi and 80s boardgames. Unusual in structure with its multiple narrators and time lines, but it is not difficult to read. The footnote sections, which add real history to the imaginary story, are a great addition. This book led me to Diaz's short story collections, This Is How You Lose Her and Drown, both of which are excellent too. Shame about the 'me too' stuff in the media though.

4 people found this helpful

Zoe Brooks

Worth working at

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

When I read the trials and tribulations of Oscar, the over-weight fantasy geek who desperately wants a relationship with a woman, I wondered how the author was going to sustain Oscar's story for a whole book. I needn't have worried: the book rapidly expands beyond Oscar's limited life to become a story of three generations of his family set against the terrible history the Dominican Republic.

This is not an easy book to read: the book's structure is complex, switching narrators, moving in and out of history. In addition there is the regular use of Spanish slang, of swear words and of geeky references to Sci Fi, fantasy and Japanese anime. For this British reader I could have done with a lexicon.

Nevertheless I found the effort of reading this book all worthwhile. It was fascinating to explore a history which I knew nothing about and to watch as the lives of Oscar and his other family members unfolded.

5 people found this helpful

Emily

Perfect

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 11, 2015

Verified Purchase

One of my favourite books. Incredibly human, witty and engaging. I can understand why the Spanish may get in the way (while I speak Spanish, I didn't understand a lot of the Dominican colloquialisms) but the book is written assuming that you don't understand the Spanish anyway so you're not missing anything by skipping through it (other than an empathy with the isolation of the characters in a strange new world they don't understand blah blah blah). Really funny yet touching and, eventually, incredibly sad. Couldn't recommend enough.

3 people found this helpful

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