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    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
    Unavailable
    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
    Unavailable
    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
    Ebook351 pages5 hours

    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

    By Junot Díaz

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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 and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateSep 6, 2007
    ISBN9781101147306
    Unavailable
    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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    Reviews for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

    4/5

    271 ratings284 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Oscar (whose real last name is de Leon) is an endearingly, heartbreakingly nerdy fellow, and his attempts to find love and to fit in with his peers will be painfully familiar to most readers. We have all known an Oscar, and we have all felt like Oscar at some point in our lives. But Oscar takes it to another level.Diaz’s narrative, which is chock full of sci-fi and literary references, makes it clear that he is also conversant in the language of nerd, and he has great sympathy for Oscar’s character. His literary references, many of which will be familiar to serious readers, add color and depth to the story and help fill out Oscar’s already giant character even more.It may sound like a downer, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ends on a note that I found to be untraditionally optimistic. Despite Oscar’s many foibles and failed attempts to find love, he grows a great deal, and the evolution of his character is one of the highlights of this great book. He is likeable and easy to relate to, and Diaz (and his narrator Yunior) succeed in giving us a character we can laugh with, when it would have been so much easier to give us one to laugh at.Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.
    • 4/5
      Masterful, colorful, humorous, large.Oscar Wao is named after Oscar Wilde. The novel has many pop culture references straight from the zeitgeist of the Geek, reminiscent of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, similarly loaded up with references to the current art of its day (now obscure except to the literary geek). Just as Gray leads a secret obsessed fantasy life, Oscar Wao does too, and they both perish for the love of their art and erotic obsessions, blind to its consequences.Oscar Wao has achieved his dream of being famous, except instead of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar ended up Francis Macomber. Francis Macomber is the character in Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", which is the other story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is named for. In Hemmingway's story Macomber's head is blown off by his wife, ironically after he acts with bravery, when he had previously acted a coward. It's an ambiguous story but there are connections with Oscar Wao's final days.The audiobook adds a new dimension to the work that reading alone, silent, may not capture. This is a swaggering, colloquial, emotionally toned novel that rewards reading out loud in character.
    • 4/5
      This is just so realistically written, that it's made me cry a few times. Incredible author.
    • 5/5
      How can one book be so brilliant and hilarious and so depressing and brutal at the same time??
    • 5/5
      I've had this novel on my shelf for a year or more and meant to get around to reading it. After Diaz' entertaining appearance on the Colbert Report, I thought it was time to grab it and begin. I'm so glad I did.

      This is a hip, fast-moving, deeply loving ode to chubby and geekish Oscar, the least Dominican of Dominicans, the most nerdly of his neighborhood. I LOVED Diaz' use of language throughout, especially of his characters' slang (most of which I didn't understand, but could either guess at or grab a quick Google translation for) - there's no stilted speech here. Instead there is fire and depth and fascinating, broken, yearning characters plunging headlong into a cursed life. Fuku indeed.

      A ton of reviews here on GR have slammed this book for its unclean language, its frivolous descriptions of love and sex - but that dirty reality seemed like truth to me, even though that culture isn't my own.

      I'll read more of Diaz for certain, and I'm passing this book around to folks who I think will also appreciate it.
    • 3/5
      A humorous, self-conscious style coupled with evocative descriptions of locales and a strand of the supernatural put this above rank-and-file coming of age novels.
    • 5/5
      Fuku's a bitch, man.
    • 3/5
      It was not just the life of Oscar, but his mother, sister, grandfather - told against the backdrop of the Trajillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. I might have gotten more out of it if I spoke Spanish and was familiar with the comic books referenced. As a history lesson, it was interesting, but I wasn't sure how I felt about Oscar's story - another boy coming of age, obsessed by love.
    • 3/5
      A review will be forthcoming when I unlose this book. Starts off fair, but was gaining speed and depth by the time it was swallowed by the Dulles Airport.
      Ok, book regained, restarted, finished. The writing moves along - style, plot, and context together, though the beginning and end are a little out of sync with the rest of the narrative. An enjoyable book. Bonus points for Diaz's contributions to the resurgence of the footnote.
    • 2/5
      My feelings on this book are complicated but also super easy to explain: I think it's probably brilliant for a lot of readers, I think Diaz is a fantastic writer, and I completely understand all of his techniques, and I think they are used masterfully... but I didn't enjoy it at all.

      Which is just to say, this book and I are not compatible. I think it is very good if it suits.
    • 4/5
      Lonely life of obese, nerdy kid Oscar Dao. He grows up in New Jersey but returns with his family to Santo Dominica in the Dominican Republic.There is a lot of historical background to the Dominican Republic and the many revolutions in its history.The story is well written and it is told by the voices of several different people including Oscar, his sister Lola, their mother Benicia Cabral, their grandmother La Inca and Oscar’s friend Junior.Fuku, or the general idea of fate or a curse is one of the underlying themes of the Dominican psyche and Oscar and his family do not escape this sentiment.The characters are well drawn, the dialogue is a mixture of English and Spanish and the story is funny and sad at the same time. Oscar spends his whole life trying to become a sci-if author, looking for love and friendship and finds none.
    • 2/5
      I really need to stay away from books that have won awards (with one exception, the Ellis Peters Award). It's a sure-fire way I'll hate the book.

      My Book Club picked this out and it's the only reason I persevered.
    • 5/5
      Oscar, Lola, Santo Domingo, Tolkien references. Not sure which I loved most.
    • 4/5
      LOVED this! I definitely recommend the audio (it was narrated by Lin-Manual Miranda!) as I would have had a HARD time reading this. There are lots of Spanish phrases, songs, and conversations that I would have tripped over but having Lin-Manuel read it to me... was beautiful. His cadence and bi-lingual ease pushed the story forward and kept it interesting and engaging. Told through multiple perspectives and generations of one family it all ties together to tell the story of Oscar, a nerdy, overweight Dominican living in New Jersey with his mom and sister Lola. He believes he's destined to die a virgin, but that doesn't stop him from checking out and falling in love with, every pretty lady he sees. There is so much more to this story then that, take my word for it and just dive in. It's complex and beautifully tied together with witty dialogue, family curses and Dominican history. Enlightening, unique, and wonderful. Junot Diaz is a world class author.
    • 4/5
      Very entertaining
    • 5/5
      I've heard a phrase used several times to describe a book - a great summer beach read. This is *not* one of those books. This is tragic, harsh in language, harsh and blunt in the opinions of the narrator, and easily one of the best books I've read. The synopsis here understandably only describes this book in a vague way and doesn't come close to hinting at the experience of reading it.

      The author goes into the history and experiences of each of the main characters in turn. For one character this takes place entirely in the Dominican Republic. For her daughter the backstory happens mostly in the Dominican Rebulic. The story of Oscar, his sister and the narrator, who very interestingly is both an observer of and a lesser character in the story, takes place in a New Jersey immigrant neighborhood. This is an epic story with great insight into the Dominican experience, the immigrant experience, the Dominican/American historical relationship, racial relationships in Latin America, and based on other things I've read in the past it offers insight into the common experiences of Latin American people under complete, unhindered dictatorships historically supported by the United States government. All of this in a personal and compelling story that will stand alone if you have no interest in any of the just mentioned subjects. Thank you Elisabeth.
    • 4/5
      I am glad I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy novels, because I would have been rather lost otherwise reading this book. As it was, I am sure I missed stuff because I was learning new Spanish vocabulary as I read, not that this is very dissimilar to what a fantasy novel might throw at its readers. In fact, it is pretty normal to have to wade through a sea of made-up words and develop a whole new vocabulary to understand fantasy novels, and taken this way, the many untranslated words and phrases lent an air of fantasy to the whole book that made Oscar's end understandable and predictable. His was a life lived in a world of unseen forces he finally understood only near his end, and that he could only hope to defeat through his own ultimate sacrifice. I wished there was a bit more to Junot Diaz' development of this theme, because for most readers who have not absorbed all that backlog of fantasy stories, the point of this story might be really hard to swallow.

      The history and cultural bits of this book were great, a slice of the Dominican Republic that reminded me of several other great books I've read from Dominican and Haitian authors. I am always glad I was not born into that world, but of course there is some of the same viciousness and sexist roughness in most of the rest of the world too, and sometimes it is easier to see it in our own communities when we read about places where the nicer sides of humanity have been worn away. So, I enjoyed this book, and it was most definitely a book for pondering long after the book is returned to the library.
    • 4/5
      The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is amazing: part family history, part history of the Dominican Republic, part slice of life of what it's like to grow up a fat geek of color.

      But what this really is is a character study of a Dominican family with, depending how you look at it, the best or worst luck on the planet (best because of how much they survive, worst because of what they have to go through).

      Diaz is masterful in letting you meet a character and gain an impression of them from their actions in someone else's story, then introducing you to that same character in their own story and changing your initial impression. He really makes each member of this poor, messed up family come alive to the reader.

      The style is very conversational, with enough comic book and sci-fi references to keep any geek happy and enough colloquial spanish to really spice up the latin flavor.
    • 4/5
      Started this for the Summer Fantasy Book Club. It's less fantasy, more fan. But really interesting: there is a shadow of a family curse, allegedly, and there is suggestion of a supernatural figure appearing at key moments. Is it a play on magical realism? Part of the story is set in Trujillo-era Dominican Republic: he and his cronies are given a more visceral and substantial feel of oppression than similar figures in GMM's 100 Years of Solitude. The main character is a Dominican-American fanboy. It took me a while to twig to the fact that the narrator is as well -- he's the one making all the pop cult (SF movies, books, games, etc.) references in the narration. At the same time the narrator is embodying a Dominican idea of masculinity, in contrast to the main character.
    • 3/5
      I could only get through half of this because I read the ebook version and it's impossible to follow.
    • 4/5
      The title character of this story, Oscar Wao, wants two things in life: 1 - to become the Domincan equivalent of J.R.R. Tolkien and and create an epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings and 2 - to fall in love and be loved in return. These seem like idealistic but achievable goals, except that Oscar, our unlikely hero, is an obese and total nerd. Also going against him is the family fuku or curse that is to blame for the tragic and bitter lives led by Oscar's family. But in spite of repeated failed romances and hardships such as brutal encounters with Dominican police thugs, Oscar remains hopeful and idealistic, always searching for love.

      I enjoyed this book. Not only was it a total eye opener about the recent violent history in the Dominican Republic and all of the brutality and suffering during dictator Trujillo's regime, I found Oscar to be such a heart wrenching hero.
    • 5/5
      This book is great. I think Paul should read it.
    • 5/5
      Humorous and heartbreaking story of the ultimate in contradictions: a nerdy sci-fi loving chunky Dominican from Jersey, impossibly inept with the ladies yet always falling in love. This story follows our hero Oscar, interweaving his story with that of his grandparents and mother with their lives in the DR, as well as his sister and best friend and their lives in New Jersey and elsewhere. Fascinating, with lots of interspersed Dominican history and the realities and aftermath of the brutal Trujillo regime of the 1930's-1960's, as well as plenty of nerdy sci-fi references. Rocky, brave, and ultimately tragic--an engrossing story, beautifully written in the way that only Latin authors have. The audiobook is especially *wonderfully* narrated by Jonathan Davis and Staci Snell.
    • 3/5
      Since this book goes through different characters, there were a lot of chapters where I just skimmed the chapters because I really didn't care about those specific characters.
    • 3/5
      Interesting work of fiction. I normally enjoy nonfiction books but liked that this story incorporated well known elements of Dominican History. It gave a me a better understanding of the character by framing his life with recent events.
    • 4/5
      I liked the novel as it progressed, the view point changed a number of times, once I got that it was a very good book. the only thing I didn't like was the foot notes!
    • 4/5
      Really good, really well written, I got caught up in the story and never got lost even though it took me all over the map and in and out of the lives of several different people over the course of decades (and not always in chronological order). I feel like I missed some things because I don't always have the Spanish to follow but I suppose Beli would have felt the same way when she first got to NY from the DR, you get the big picture but some of the nuance escapes. I found myself getting angry with the characters' fatalism, but hey I guess that means I cared enough about them, believed enough in them that they could make me mad.
    • 4/5
      Trujillo. Wow. Quite the domineering bastard.

      I love the chances that Diaz takes in this novel. Some of it is so very chancy that I'm not sure if I like it yet.

      This is one of those novels that I second guessed when I was reading the very last pages of the book (probably because I was waiting for the Umph that Nobel Prize Literature is supposed to give me...if that Umph exists at all).

      Diaz spends a lot of time building up his characters and the history that has mired their lives, so you must be patient with this book. As soon as you start trusting the narrator's keen insight and wonderfully street-erudite and emphatic prose, you're in until the end.

      The historical aspect of the novel sent me on a long Googling session. I love it when books send me on researching missions.

      Who knows? I might end up giving this book five stars or three stars in the next coming weeks.
    • 4/5
      As a white, middle-aged woman in mid-america, the world of Oscar is about as far off as another planet. However, thanks to Junot Diaz, I was able to travel there and be sincerely touched by what I "saw." Just as a traveler to a remote and strange culture, however, there was much that I simply didn't understand. I never read science fiction/fantasy; have no knowledge of Spanish/Spaglish; hate video games; kind of a prude when it comes to language; and know almost nothing of DR history -- yet, I can say I truly enjoyed this book. The character development of Oscar and his family is absolutely brilliant.The book is filled with references and allusions I didn't understand (I did look many of them up and still didn't understand [what's with Joseph Conrad's wife?]) The language is raw, the story is filled with brutality, yet it glitters with humor, insight, and love. It's not for everyone, but I, for one, am glad I read it.
    • 5/5
      Among the many things I loved about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, my favorite is the narrator. I have a soft spot for narrators who are characters (in both literature and drama); I am enchanted by the power to step out of the narrative to comment, to reflect, to frame, to misdirect. The best narrators do all those things at once.That is what captivates me about Brief Wondrous' narrator, Yunior. He positions himself as the machismo ideal, the athlete, the womanizer, the champion of the world; yet, he reveals himself by degrees to be deeply steeped in the nerd culture that he contemptuously tries to pull Oscar out of. Either Yunior is not the man he claims to be, or else his "sham" friendship with Oscar (he claims to have faked it all) was layered with a complexity that Yunior may not fully understand.Yunior's voice is unique, as his perspective. Most of the great narrator characters tell their own story. It's a tried and true device to allow the audience into the mind of the protagonist: Holden Caulfield, Nathan Zuckerman, Humbert Humbert, and Huckleberry Finn all live at the center of their own storms. Yunior belongs to a much smaller class of narrators who relay to us what happened to someone else. The two closest comparisons (and ones I do not make lightly) are both anonymous: the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five (who tells us the story of Billy Pilgrim) and the narrator of Heart of Darkness (who tells us the story Marlow ostensibly told to him).In all, Brief Wonderous is a fantastic read (or if you're an audiobook lover like me, a fantastic listen). If it's spend the last couple of years in the midst of your to-read list, it's time to put it at the top of the stack.