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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books

First off, you should read Gregory Baird's review of this book on this website. My review is meant to augment his and provide some ancillary information (and opinions).

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968. He moved to NJ when he was six-years old. He spent his teenage years in Old Bridge and Perth Amboy. He got his undergraduate degree from Rutgers and his graduate degree from Cornell. He is currently teaching creative writing at MIT. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel in April, 2008. He released a note that stated his shock and appreciation for the award, and then he went on to rhapsodize about how thrilled he was to win the award in the same year that Bob Dylan was given an honorary Pulitzer.

For the naysayers and the censors: Mr. Diaz uses curses, describes sexual situations (from both the male and female point of view), depicts violence, and he doesn't use standard punctuation. If these are things that traditionally bother you, then you should avoid this book.

Diaz makes a great many allusions to The Lord of the Rings, the Marvel & DC Universes, game mechanics from Dungeons & Dragons and the Rutgers New Brunswick campus. If you are familiar with one or more of these, you'll find the book even more rewarding (if you were born between 1965 and 1985 and have a few nerdy qualities, this book is definitely for you).

Oscar is an anti-hero that is both endearing and entertaining. While the book shifts narrators and settings (to tell us the history of his mother and grandfather) and is gripping throughout, Oscar is, by far, the star of novel in every single way.


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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books Reviews

This book was easily one of the best I read this year. Its blend of cultural history, 80's nerdery, mystical curses, and romanticism create a relatable family history. My family is Cuban and this family history was so reminiscent of my own. It is hard not to sympathize with Oscar and his family. Oscar is the perfect pure soul who's goal is something we all strive for love and acceptance.

If you are a fan of magical realism and cultural diverse stories definitely give this a try. If you have ever felt like an outcast please give this a try.
Another book which, but for my office's book club, I'd never have even heard of, let alone read and which I'm terribly glad I did. (I'm also terribly glad I bought a used copy, but that's another issue.)

What we have here, is the story of a nerd - a fat (incredibly fat), ugly, intellectual, verbose nerd whose parents (Dad left when Oscar was but a wee thing) came from the Dominican Republic but who grows up in Paterson, New Jersey, and who dreams of just two things love (ideally including the physical sort) and becoming the Dominican Tolkien.

He is, as you might expect, a rather frustrated young man.

Whole sections of the book, though, are not directly about Oscar, but about his family his mama, Belicia De Leon (nee Cabral), the child of a cursed family; his sister Lola; Beli's father Abelard, who fell afoul of Trujillo and met the end that tended to meet such afoul-fallers. Perhaps a third of the book is directly about Oscar de Leon (who acquires the nickname Wao when some Domincan homies apparently have never heard of, and cannot correctly pronounce, Wilde).

It's written, mostly, in a brilliant English, but with large quantities of Spanish, Dominican Spanish slang, and I don't know what-all else. (I learned a number of Spanish words during the course of the book, some of which are not for use in polite company. Also the N-word pops up far more often than a gringo blanco like myself is comfortable with.)

Most of the story is narrated by Díaz's stand-in, a Dominico called Yunior, which raises questions of how he knows some of the things he seems to know. Indeed, the final chapter reads to me as something tacked on by Yunior to give Oscar a bit of a happy ending. Your take on this may vary.

Anyway, a lot of the book takes place in the Dominican Republic of Trujillo and his successors; the climax occurs during the unacknowledged occupation of the DR by America in the '80s; and it would be incredibly grim if it were not also incredibly funny. I can't decide whether it's a funny book that happens to be sad, or a sad book that happens to be funny. It's funny that way.

What propels the story more than Yunior's voice is the characters. They sparkle with life even when terrible things are happening to them, and they change, both as time passes, and as we get to know them better. (Mama Beli, as we first see her through Oscar's then Lola's eyes, seems like a terrible person; then we learn her story and everything just shifts.)

It is a terrible, a tragic story with the inevitability that makes a tragedy tragic and not merely bathetic. You won't go far wrong picking it up - from a library, or a used book emporium, or some such, please.
Pros For me, this book somehow manages to embody that elusive “magical realism” genre that so many authors have attempted to capture since Gabriel Garcia Marquez coined the category with “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The characters are real and flawed and complex, the history is rich, and the story sucked me in immediately. This is honestly one of the best books I have read in the past few years. I have given it as a gift to multiple people, and they have had nothing but good things to say about it.

Cons Don’t buy the edition. You need the hard-copy with the footnotes right on the page for you to read right as they come up in the book. There are a lot of footnotes, and they’re 100% needed to fully enjoy/understand the book.
First off, you should read Gregory Baird's review of this book on this website. My review is meant to augment his and provide some ancillary information (and opinions).

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968. He moved to NJ when he was six-years old. He spent his teenage years in Old Bridge and Perth Amboy. He got his undergraduate degree from Rutgers and his graduate degree from Cornell. He is currently teaching creative writing at MIT. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel in April, 2008. He released a note that stated his shock and appreciation for the award, and then he went on to rhapsodize about how thrilled he was to win the award in the same year that Bob Dylan was given an honorary Pulitzer.

For the naysayers and the censors Mr. Diaz uses curses, describes sexual situations (from both the male and female point of view), depicts violence, and he doesn't use standard punctuation. If these are things that traditionally bother you, then you should avoid this book.

Diaz makes a great many allusions to The Lord of the Rings, the Marvel & DC Universes, game mechanics from Dungeons & Dragons and the Rutgers New Brunswick campus. If you are familiar with one or more of these, you'll find the book even more rewarding (if you were born between 1965 and 1985 and have a few nerdy qualities, this book is definitely for you).

Oscar is an anti-hero that is both endearing and entertaining. While the book shifts narrators and settings (to tell us the history of his mother and grandfather) and is gripping throughout, Oscar is, by far, the star of novel in every single way.