Goodreads | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Constant Reader	4	04/08/2008 08:33AM

David rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

04/10/08

Meet Oscar de Leon, dubbed "Oscar Wao" by bullies who liken him to the foppish Oscar Wilde. Our Oscar is a fat, virginal Dominican-American teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunchbox to school, spends hours painting his Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, and who knows "more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee." If Nerd was a country, Oscar would be its undisputed king. Oscar is the kind of kid—sweaty, mumbles to himself, inevitably invades personal space, probab...more Meet Oscar de Leon, dubbed "Oscar Wao" by bullies who liken him to the foppish Oscar Wilde. Our Oscar is a fat, virginal Dominican-American teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunchbox to school, spends hours painting his Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, and who knows "more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee." If Nerd was a country, Oscar would be its undisputed king. Oscar is the kind of kid—sweaty, mumbles to himself, inevitably invades personal space, probably has bad breath—we would avoid on the subway.

In Junot Diaz' debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, however, Oscar is the flame and we are the moths. An earnestly open-hearted protagonist, he draws us to him until we incinerate in the intensity of his character. He's a pitiful-but-hopeful loser we can all relate to, even the Prom Kings and Queens among us (who might just be the loneliest kids in school). The last time I was this absorbed by a fictional weirdo was in 1989 when John Irving's Owen Meany forced me--FORCED, I SAY!—to read his Prayer twice in rapid, thirsty succession. Oscar held me captive in much the same way with his sweaty, sticky fingers tightly gripping my attention.

Let's return to Diaz for a moment. To use the words "Diaz" and "debut novel" in such close proximity is something of a joke. Diaz has been a middleweight figure on the literary scene for eleven years, based almost exclusively on his previous (and only) book Drown, a collection of interconnected stories which, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, chronicled the Dominican immigrant experience with a startling freshness. If you turn to the back flap of that 1996 book, you'll read an author bio which concludes with "He lives in New York City and is at work on his first novel." That was eleven years ago. To say that Oscar Wao was much-anticipated would be an understatement.

Why the long wait? Tick off the reasons on your fingers: writer's block, the paralysis of sudden fame at a young age (Diaz was in his late 20s when the accolades started flooding in), working for years on an apocalyptic novel about the destruction of New York City which was eventually trumped by the sur-reality of 9/11, not seeing anything on the blank wall which stares back at you unblinking, you name it. Little of that matters now, except as an interesting footnote of trivia, because today we hold in our hands the solid, substantial Oscar Wao. For a first novel, it's an impressive triumph.

Now back to Oscar. As the novel's title implies, this is the chronicle of Oscar's brief, candle-flame life and charts his quest, but rarely conquest, of girls. You see, not only is Oscar a Tolkein-loving, Star Trek-quoting, Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek, he's a horny geek whose tongue hangs out and eyes bulge in cartoon cones every time a pretty girl walks by. The only trouble is, as his friend Yunior points out, "Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber." Save for one incredibly happy encounter late in his life, Oscar's lust is unrequited, but he takes this as a matter of course because he believes his family is living under the cloud of an Old-World curse called fuku, brought to our shores, he believes, by Columbus.

Despite wearing the family doom like a black, itchy sweater and meeting romantic rejection at every turn, Oscar optimistically journeys through the 1970s, "the dawn of the Nerd Age," Diaz writes. It's Oscar against the world and he glumly accepts his lot in life. "Everybody," he says at one point, "misapprehends me." As he grows older and retreats from his peers into the world of Lovecraft, Doc Savage, Asimov, Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Oscar begins to think his destiny is to be "the Dominican Tolkein." He spends countless hours holed up in his room writing science-fiction and fantasy tales. If Diaz had allowed, Oscar probably would have spent eleven years working on his masterpiece; but, as we're always reminded, this is a brief life. Oscar tries to make the most of it, even with the fuku hanging over his head.

The novel is more than just a Nerd Epic, however. Diaz pulls out all the stops in an attempt to tell a all-encompassing story of immigration and assimilation. Oscar lives with his mother and sister in the ghetto of Paterson, New Jersey, and the novel is as much their story as it is his. We're just starting to groove with sympathy for fat little Oscar when Diaz suddenly shifts gears and takes us into the world of Lola, Oscar's beautiful, athletic sister who has a stormy relationship with their mother, Belicia, a "hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador." Then, before too many more pages have elapsed, we're deep in that woman's story, in a long section of the book called "The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral," where we learn what happened to her back in the Dominican Republic to make her so bitterly protective of her children. These chapters, along with the rest of the book for that matter, really are filled with heartbreak, a transmogrification of fuku that shapes the course of everything to come, from Oscar's obsession with Shazam to Lola's runaway teen saga.

Diaz also proves to be something of a risk-taker. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao bravely assumes there is an audience of readers who will sit through a long novel in which the English and Spanish languages mingle without the author once stopping to translate the unfamiliar words. The gist of what the Spanglish phrases mean is pretty easy to pick up, and for those readers who absolutely have to know what guapa or chuleria mean…well, an English-Spanish dictionary is as close as the internet.

Diaz also assumes his readers will come to the table with some knowledge of Dominican history, specifically the tyrannical regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and who, if Oscar is to be believed, was master of the fuku. Trujillo who? You know, the "portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery." If your mind is as blank as mine when it comes to the island's past, never fear: Diaz replays the highlights of Santo Domingo History 101 in footnotes which annotate the novel. Yes, footnotes. The novel is peppered with them, as any well-respecting Screed of Nerd should be. Diaz knows most of us don't know squat about Dominicans and, as in Drown, he brings us briskly into the light. (Pay attention to Trujillo, though, because he plays an important role in Oscar's destiny.)

Diaz never lets the pace lag and his sentences remain fresh and sharp throughout. One woman is described with "eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had set"; later, Yunior describes how it feels to be mugged: "my guts feeling like they'd been taken out of me, beaten with mallets, and then reattached with paper clips." Through his wondrous use of language, Diaz brings the book alive and makes it tremble in our hands.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an epic in the truest sense and in its fat, endearing hero's chest beats a Homeric heart. Oscar leads us through his unflagging quest for happiness, while Diaz tumbles us through a century of Dominican history and shows us how the brief life of one lonely boy can epitomize the immigrant experience. This novel was well worth the decade-long wait....less

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Justin rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

05/08/08

Read in April, 2008

Oscar Wao, the main character in author Junot Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a comic-book/sci-fi/role-playing gamer nerd of the nth degree. Add to that adolescent dysfunction the misery of being grossly overweight, “blacker” than the rest of his Dominican family and neighbors, and raised in Paterson, New Jersey during the 70s and 80s, and you’ve got one poor pathetic little muchacho. His search for reciprocated love runs up against more roadblocks and hostility than even the le...more Oscar Wao, the main character in author Junot Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a comic-book/sci-fi/role-playing gamer nerd of the nth degree. Add to that adolescent dysfunction the misery of being grossly overweight, “blacker” than the rest of his Dominican family and neighbors, and raised in Paterson, New Jersey during the 70s and 80s, and you’ve got one poor pathetic little muchacho. His search for reciprocated love runs up against more roadblocks and hostility than even the lesser-heroes of the Marvel Universe face on a monthly basis. He is an idealist, a dreamer, a boy in love with love who can’t escape himself no matter how much those around him encourage a normative change for the better.

Although Oscar’s story holds the main thrust of the narrative, both his sister Lola and mother Hypatia Belicia Cabral also have their stories told. Yunior, an outsider who gains a vantage point to the Dominican family by way of mysterious-to-the-end circumstances, narrates Oscar and Belicia’s histories with a profane, pop-hip, heavily Spanish-laden style. Himself a geek god, Yunior is a foil of sorts to Oscar; he is as intimate with the worlds of The Watchmen and Doctor Who as his gordo subject, yet has gained his street cred by stepping up as a major playa with the ladies of the neighborhood. He stands as Oscar’s personal ideal, hatched from a socially awkward mind full of ideal women to love, epic novels to write, and heroic lives to live. Yunior, in effect, gets Oscar, understands that if God hadn’t given him the looks or the mad game with the women, he could easily have become the boy of this story.

The other narrator is Lola, who tells her story early on in first-person, filling in gaps of detail that Yunior doesn’t have the resources to shed full light on. The beautiful and rebellious sister of Oscar bridges the distance between NJ and the DR, spending a vast amount of her time growing up in Santo Domingo and experiencing the heritage she would rather ignore. The style is an abrupt yet welcome change from the footnote-heavy, politically charged, comic-book jargon of Yunior’s narrative pulse. With Lola, the language is grounded, more deeply felt and personal.

Overall, the novel crisscrosses these three distinct-but-connected narratives quite well, peppering in more than a bit of historical background on dictator Trujillo’s decades-long reign of terror on the people of the Dominican Republic. The intimate details and colorful descriptions of the characters (Oscar’s madre, as a violent-tempered youth in DR, “Threw her drink, her glass, and then her purse at him – if there had been a baby nearby she would have thrown that too.”) mesh nicely with the political overview of the small island-state.

There are, however, missteps in the telling, which mostly revolve around its tendency to over-tell, to over-explain a given scene or historical event. Conversely, Diaz doesn’t tell enough when heaping mounds of Spanish language into the narration without benefit of a translation or even a proper context to aid the reader in deciphering it on our own. Frankly, it removed me from the flow of the story, made me think that I was deliberately being left out of some vital information because I didn’t know the language. Now, I can see how this could actually serve as an effective narrative tool (making the reading audience feel the confusion or isolation of the characters by placing us in a parallel position of exclusion), but Diaz doesn’t seem conscious of using the non-translated language as a device, and instead appears to add it merely as another ingredient there to enhance the flavor of the novel. In fairness, Hemingway did the same thing (see THE SUN ALSO RISES and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS for egregious uses of this offense), so there is clearly a precedent. And, since Diaz admits to naming the book after the title of Hemingway's famous work, THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER, then this storytelling transgression may simply be an affect of imitation.

The ending is very thrilling, managing to wrap things up not only with an exciting climax, but with an unexpected breadth of emotion. It ends sweetly, but not sentimentally, and does so in a way that complements all that has come before. It even manages to enhance everything to a palpable degree, with a poignancy and resonance that kept the novel as a whole in my mind long after I finished it.
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James rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

03/19/08

Read in March, 2008

Junot Diaz has written a damn fine story here. It’s about a typical character that typically slips unmentioned and unregarded through the cracks of our typical existence. The protagonist of Diaz’s highly acclaimed novel is a fat, nerdy nobody, Oscar Wao. When offered pot, he replies, “I might partake. Just a little, though. I would not want to cloud my faculties.” See. Total dork.

But with some history of the Dominican Republic’s oppressive Trujillo regime as a backdrop and some ver...more Junot Diaz has written a damn fine story here. It’s about a typical character that typically slips unmentioned and unregarded through the cracks of our typical existence. The protagonist of Diaz’s highly acclaimed novel is a fat, nerdy nobody, Oscar Wao. When offered pot, he replies, “I might partake. Just a little, though. I would not want to cloud my faculties.” See. Total dork.

But with some history of the Dominican Republic’s oppressive Trujillo regime as a backdrop and some very creative and imaginative dabbling in curses, sex, love, family, and violence, Diaz creates a remarkable story.

Diaz’s work is a Modern American Novel about the Modern American Experience, which is the Modern American Immigrant Experience. It is an experience that has been America’s legacy for some time now and will continue to be thanks to the talented likes of Junot Diaz.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is told with a fresh, colloquial familiarity that authentically captures and illuminates the world of Oscar Wao, a young Dominican living in New Jersey. Things are “real as shit,” people are described with, “them two was tight,” and one individual “was supposed to have Atomic Level G.” There is plenty of Spanish throughout, so a working conversational grasp of the language would certainly add to the experience. Otherwise keep WordReference open on a laptop nearby to translate things like, “And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their motherfucking frames? A culo que jalaba mas que una junta de buey. Dios mio!”

Diaz even manages to sneak in some post-9/11 literary styling. Oscar’s sister’s hot friends are “all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven.”

I started this book rolling my eyes, unimpressed. Here we go, I thought, a Dominican Catcher in the Rye about an unrealistically over-smart adolescent in a coming of age story trying to fuck girls saying things like, “I do not move so precipitously.”

But before my frustration was able to build too much, boom, the narrator changed from third person omniscient to the point of view of his sister. And then his Mom. And then one of his sister’s boyfriends. It actually all worked quite well.

There are plenty of pop culture references, mostly from the nerd-realm of Lord of the Rings, comic books, and graphic novels, but also The Simpsons, Proust, and our globe’s fucked up history. With all the references to comics and works like Watchmen, Brief Wondrous Life makes for a nice companion piece to Quantum Lyrics. There’s even a bit of nerd wisdom: “But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain’t no fucking Middle-earth.”

There are also plenty of footnotes that work to give Diaz’s novel the guise of an actual, serious biography. If anything, it has strong parallels to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

Unfortunately, Brief Wondrous Life is guilty of committing one of my biggest book pet peeves: characters in books who are aspiring writers. Is this all writers can write about? And if that’s not enough, when describing a particularly brutal beating, Diaz chooses to tell us via his narrator that, “It was like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless.” Isn’t it bad enough that Junot Diaz is a writer who was born in the Dominican Republic, raised in New Jersey, and teaches at M.I.T. writing about a boy who was born in the Dominican Republic and living in New Jersey and going to college?

Diaz’s novel is also annoyingly self-aware, apparatus apparent, if you will. The narrator says things like, “And now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale,” which really bugs me. I know this is a story, Junot. I got your novel in the fiction section.

I even read it....less

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Dale rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

12/03/07

Read in October, 2007

This is the twenty-fifth book I read on my commute. There's absolutely no question that this is a modern-lit novel, but it has a really good view of the genre ghetto from where it's situated. This is really yet another example of the way that my tastes and inclination subvert my own heartfelt attempts to broaden my horizons. Given a choice between a novel about inter-generational dreams and disillusionments where the main character loves baseball and dreams of being a doctor, or a very simila...more This is the twenty-fifth book I read on my commute. There's absolutely no question that this is a modern-lit novel, but it has a really good view of the genre ghetto from where it's situated. This is really yet another example of the way that my tastes and inclination subvert my own heartfelt attempts to broaden my horizons. Given a choice between a novel about inter-generational dreams and disillusionments where the main character loves baseball and dreams of being a doctor, or a very similar premise where the main character loves comic books and dreams of being a sci-fi novelist, I will invariably gravitate towards the latter. What can I say, I turn to non-fiction to learn stuff, but when it comes to the escapism of novels I like to have a high level of familiarity going in.

I knew about the comic-book-fan-dreaming-of-being-a-sci-fi-novelist aspect of The Brief And Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from the review of it which prompted me to put it on my wishlist, which is how I got it for my birthday. What I didn't know was that the book was also about Dominican-Americans, or that it was also about life in New Jersey and prominently featured Rutgers University. I grew up in NJ and Rutgers was practically in my backyard. I'm not from the Dominican Republic but I appreciate the culture and I speak a little Spanish. I presume my geek cred does not need to be accounted for.

So as the story of the novel unfolds, tracing the lives of various family members and the history of their country, the author seems to throw in as many obscure references as possible to the point where it the novel becomes like a wild, impenetrable jungle of ideas you need a machete to hack through. Unless you happen to speak some Spanish (since the characters lapse into it without translating) and you also happen to know the general layout of New Brunswick and Rutgers campus, and you also happen to know the difference between obscure characters with made-up sounding names from different sources like the Planet of the Apes, the Lord of the Rings, and Jack Kirby's Fourth World. So I counted myself lucky that I happened to be just that sort of person, and I enjoyed the hell out of the book, although I couldn't help but wonder who the book had been written for (other than me, of course).

Now it's the end of the year and this novel is appearing on a lot of "Best of 2007" lists, and it has me wondering all over again. Are the serious book reviewers who rate The Brief And Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao so highly secretly closet genre freaks? Or do they enjoy the book the way that I might enjoy German opera - moved by the soaring music but not really sure what everyone is talking about? Maybe in the end the book really does have something for everyone. Allusions to comic book villains and Dominican history aside, it's mainly about sex and sexuality and the pain and pleasure attendant to them, and I suppose at the end of they day that's all pretty universal.

Running total for types of books read on the commute:

Classics: 1
Modern Lit: 8
Fantasy/sci-fi: 12
Non-fiction: 4
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Gregory rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

04/24/08

Read in September, 2007

“I did all I could and it still wasn’t enough.”

“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 ...more “I did all I could and it still wasn’t enough.”

“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...less

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Kat rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

04/21/08

Read in April, 2008

I enjoyed this book a lot. Its a story about family, a crash course in modern Dominican history, and will bring a smaile to the faces of comic book readers and sci-fi fans. Note that the book is not sci-fi, although there are apperances made by figures from Dominican folklore.

This book reminded me of, of all things, an xkcd comic. This particular comic is highly amusing to me because I imagine the subset of people who listen to Missy Elli...more I enjoyed this book a lot. Its a story about family, a crash course in modern Dominican history, and will bring a smaile to the faces of comic book readers and sci-fi fans. Note that the book is not sci-fi, although there are apperances made by figures from Dominican folklore.

This book reminded me of, of all things, an xkcd comic. This particular comic is highly amusing to me because I imagine the subset of people who listen to Missy Elliot enough to recognize the lyrics and also understand cryptography is not huge.

By the same token, this book will attract two audiences which may not have much overlap initially: People interested in reading work by a talented Dominican author writing a captivating tale that encompasses Domincan history and culture, and people interested in the book because of its clever use of sci-fi and comic book references.

This book came to me through the second group, literally at a comic book event. I won it for correctly answering a question about the Hulk. The guys doing the event said the book was awesome and wanted to encourage sci-fi and comic book fans to read it. Thing is, I don't know how many people speak New York Dominican slang, and have encyclopedic knowledge of the characters in Lord of the Rings and Dune.

Don't get me wrong, you can get through the book if are only versed in the lingo of one of the two universes this book reference, or even if you know neither. I think its probably easiest if you know the spanish and not the sci-fi references, since they are easy enough to look up. By the end of the book I understand a fair amount of the spanish that was commonly used.

Pros: Everything I've said above for why I liked the book. Engaging, with a good mixture of humor, personal obversation and history.

Cons: It can be little frustrating when characters switch entirely into spanish, especially if you're not near a computer to look up the terms, as was often the case when I was reading on the train.
2) The book has some harsh violence, including violence against women and children. Forewarned, in case that bothers you.
3) Use of the n-word, racial epithets. Yes, I know, its slang, and people use it, doesn't mean I have to like it. And before you ask, yes I have danced to Kanye West's Gold Digger and other songs with the n-word. I'm not thrilled its in there too. My preference for this sort of thing is for such words to be used in moderation.

Call me oversensitive, it was still jarring to be reading the word frequently, especially at the beginning. I understand this is accurate, this is how people from this time and place talk, but just like I don't want to hear it constantly in the music I listen to, reading it constantly was unsettling at points. To be fair, there is plenty of Spanish vulgarity, which I haven't complained about only because I didn't understand most of it, and didn't bother looking it up. Consider it a warning if strong-language bothers you, in English or Spanish....less

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Mina rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

04/03/08

bookshelves: contemporary-fiction, own

Read in March, 2008

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao is irreverent, crass, angry - and wondrous. really. when i first started reading it, i was a little worried; i enjoyed the first chapter, enjoyed oscar's nerdiness and could definitely empathize with his situation, but it didn't wow me the way diaz's short stories did. those stories don't make you feel empathy; they take you into darker and more dangerous territory than the merely familiar or the merely known.

then i got to the second chapter, the s...more the brief wondrous life of oscar wao is irreverent, crass, angry - and wondrous. really. when i first started reading it, i was a little worried; i enjoyed the first chapter, enjoyed oscar's nerdiness and could definitely empathize with his situation, but it didn't wow me the way diaz's short stories did. those stories don't make you feel empathy; they take you into darker and more dangerous territory than the merely familiar or the merely known.

then i got to the second chapter, the shift in perspective - and then, there, that was when i sat up and went, YES. from there it was all unknown, it was all exploration. what's funny is that the stuff in the book is material found, more or less, in diaz's other works, heavy on the autobiographical touch, obsessed with a diasporic experience that is certainly common to many many other immigrants and children of immigrants in america...and yet, somehow, the book is not made narrow or redundant by its material but instead made new again through the shifting voices and narratives and narrative techniques diaz employs throughout.

the "hyphenated experience" (asian-american, latin-american, african-american, or what have you) is, i think, both inspiration and curse when used as basis for fiction - don't have the room to go into that here, but it's part of the reason why, for example, i love junot diaz but dislike jhumpa lahiri (to give just two names). lahiri writes solidly, but there is absolutely nothing i could learn from her stories that i couldn't learn from, say, an interview. the voices of her characters become the single voice of someone going me, me, me, even (or especially) when lahiri is ostensibly writing about varied experiences. she's invoking the Immigrant Experience, but from within it. in other words, she's staying safely within the lines.

when diaz writes, the voices of his characters do not say me, me, me; they say us. the thing about that "us," though, is that it's fractured and internally discordant, fissured - and also open to the possibility of a plurality of readers. angry but also afraid of the divisions between us and them, afraid of reinforcing those walls. there are times when i think he doesn't succeed in breaking down other walls (of gender, for example), and when his anger can become truly alienating, but still, in the end, when i put down a diaz book i feel as if my life has changed, has undergone a sea-change. it's the same with kazuo ishiguro, gish jen, sherman alexie. it's the same with all of my favorite authors, actually, regardless of race.

i know i'm going to sound vague, and i can't explain it adequately, but i am convinced that one of the prime causes, the mechanics of that power, is in each author's writing style. [cue ursula k. le guin essay here]...less

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Debbie rated it:

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04/25/08

bookshelves: highlyrecommend

I am not finished yet, but I am really loving this book. What a voice, what lyrical, amazing language. He is truly gifted.

OK, I read it.

I cannot help but be influenced by our country's current talk about illegal immigrants, which has led to public discourse about immigrants in general. It is a talk that, to many, risks cold analysis, and for some, resentment, anger. So, given this backdrop, I personally cannot help but see this book as primarily an immigrant saga with several themes r...more I am not finished yet, but I am really loving this book. What a voice, what lyrical, amazing language. He is truly gifted.

OK, I read it.

I cannot help but be influenced by our country's current talk about illegal immigrants, which has led to public discourse about immigrants in general. It is a talk that, to many, risks cold analysis, and for some, resentment, anger. So, given this backdrop, I personally cannot help but see this book as primarily an immigrant saga with several themes related to this--painful diaspora, scars from a cruel government carried in the bloodstream (this point is put forth metaphorically, a reference to this as a curse--fuku), passed on to children now here with us, isolation and need for cultural identity (altho this was not a real push in the book, like other immigration sagas I have read. He was very careful not to be immigration-saga-like), the unrequited love of country and culture of one's origin (unrequited when controlled by a cruel and heartless regime).

The overall energy that pulled the story together was represented by the character Oscar Wao's pure, charming, idealistic drive for love. Oscar is a son of an illegal immigrant--part of the Dominican diaspora who came here bruised and worn down from a harsh regime. He grew up in New Jersey, your basic fat kid who escapes his painful life by way of writing and reading. But what makes Oscar unique is his determination, despite obstacles, to find love. The irony of respect and love of women by a man who cannot receive love in return while living in a culture that seems to disrespect women, is, at least to me, the major force of this book. And yet this man, unattractive and rejected sexually, does not give up his idealistic quest, And more importantly, until the end, he never understands that he is able to obtain what other men, who can only be intimate with sex, cannot--a deep and abiding understanding of women. His pure ideals are like the comic characters he reads. He lives in a world of sci fi and fantasy. He writes this world. And it stays there--in fantasy-- until the very end. But when his dream becomes a reality, Oscar, becomes a super hero. I think this character, like all great characters, is symbolic.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

That about says it all.

Brilliant book. Lots of footnotes that would be annoying if not for Diaz's great humor. I would however recommend researching quickly the Trujillo regime. This will help.

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Maggie rated it:

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11/26/07

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

Narrated by an old college roommate named Junior, "Oscar Wao" is, among other things, the story of Oscar LaInca - an overweight, sci-fi reading, Dungeons and Dragons playing, "ghetto nerd," whose nickname is Spanglish for Oscar Wilde (meant as an insult, alluding to both Wilde's girth and sexuality). Although Dominican, Oscar completely defies the machismo stereotype, and given that he lives in the more-than-a-little-rough Paterson, NJ, Oscar spends most of his time in his be...more Narrated by an old college roommate named Junior, "Oscar Wao" is, among other things, the story of Oscar LaInca - an overweight, sci-fi reading, Dungeons and Dragons playing, "ghetto nerd," whose nickname is Spanglish for Oscar Wilde (meant as an insult, alluding to both Wilde's girth and sexuality). Although Dominican, Oscar completely defies the machismo stereotype, and given that he lives in the more-than-a-little-rough Paterson, NJ, Oscar spends most of his time in his bedroom where he can safely escape behind his Akira posters, Tolkien and role-playing games when he isn't in the midst of an obsessive and wholly one-sided love affair with some disinterested female.

As can be easily inferred from the title, Oscar's life is brief; yet, Junior must span two countries and three generations in order to tell the story of it. He begins by explaining that the LaInca family is said to have suffered from a powerful fuku (curse) earned when Oscar's grandfather angered Trujillo. Anticipating that most readers may have "missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history," Junior explains:

Trujillo, one of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality. A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-ear haberdashery, Trujillo (known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DR's political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror...He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our One and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.

The story of the Trujillo-era Dominican Republic becomes the backdrop for Díaz’s tale, which is equal parts coming-of-age novel, historical fiction, and epic family saga that seamlessly weaves hip-hop, feminism, mythology, science fiction and magical realism throughout.

And if I haven't made it clear enough by my rambling and overly long overview, I loved it. Admittedly, it took a little while for me to fully get into it, but was hooked come fifty pages in. I felt two sorts of sadness at the novel's conclusion: one for the sweet, brave, pathetic Oscar, and the other because I simply didn't want it to be over....less

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Gin rated it:

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02/20/08

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: anyone and everyone

"Muchacha del diablo, I promised you nothing." That's a bit of a turning point in the narrative...well, I thought so anyway. It's part of what made Lola, and if you read Diaz's novel that will make perfect sense.

Racism. Sexism. Wounded people surviving by wounding other, weaker people. Welcome to the world of Oscar and his family.

This book is so much surrender and lamentation that it really did wreck me. Yes, it's about Oscar--and all of his brevity and wonder--but ...more "Muchacha del diablo, I promised you nothing." That's a bit of a turning point in the narrative...well, I thought so anyway. It's part of what made Lola, and if you read Diaz's novel that will make perfect sense.

Racism. Sexism. Wounded people surviving by wounding other, weaker people. Welcome to the world of Oscar and his family.

This book is so much surrender and lamentation that it really did wreck me. Yes, it's about Oscar--and all of his brevity and wonder--but it's also this beautiful, honest, vulgar wad (that's right...wad) of love and unspeakable suffering. Grief, too. I do mean unspeakable by the way--that's really the key word here--a hard thing to communicate in print which only makes my admiration for Mr. Diaz grow. If you read the book and take in the brutality (and the tiny moments of joy that are what really give credence to the landscape) that governs the lives of all of the characters you would be wrecked, too. Oscar is excessive both corporeally and passionately, a young man scraped down to the nerve such that he only finds satisfaction in his mostly sci-fi though sometimes pornographic imagination...or does he? Go figure if you will, but you would do much better to just read the book. Anyway. There is a great deal more to the novel than Oscar's longings...half of the book is given over to the recounting of the horrifying history of the Dominican Republic, a history that has sadly played out through almost all of the Spanish-speaking world, emphasis on the Americas, emphasis on the women. Much of the story is devoted to what the women in Oscar's life have had no choice but to live through...I would like to go off on the conglomeration of evils that have created that very, very special variety of misogyny that plagues these cultures (I actually lived in one of them! It is a nice thing to be free of all of that) and the God-soaked excuses for why these things must be, but I won't. That would be the longest review ever. The only other thing that I'll say is that I wish that Diaz was not so generous regarding the refuge of superstition; but for that this would be a five-star book. That said it is still wonderful as it demands that I try to find some new category of thinking as there as far worse things that could happen to a girl or that could (and still does) happen to anyone. ...less

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Mark rated it:

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05/04/08

bookshelves: recentlyread

Read in April, 2008

A strange, gorgeous, irritating—OK, and wondrous, novel—something here for everyone, though not everyone will like everything about it and I imagine some will hate something about it…. I could liken it to a feast that includes junk food as well as haute cuisine, both American and Caribbean. All the attitudes of eating—appetite, disgust, gluttony, gourmandise—seem to be required or provoked by this smorgasbord of family history, political analysis, romance, pop cultural allusion, bilin...more A strange, gorgeous, irritating—OK, and wondrous, novel—something here for everyone, though not everyone will like everything about it and I imagine some will hate something about it…. I could liken it to a feast that includes junk food as well as haute cuisine, both American and Caribbean. All the attitudes of eating—appetite, disgust, gluttony, gourmandise—seem to be required or provoked by this smorgasbord of family history, political analysis, romance, pop cultural allusion, bilingual humor…. I’d also recommend you have some Spanish and know your Tolkien, because Diaz doesn’t translate (in the way that Lahiri does, for example—though of course American readers should be steeped in Spanish a hell of a lot more than in Bengali), though he does footnote, especially when describing the sordid details of Dominican history. The narrator too seems to play many roles and use many voices; he’s one-third sex-crazed rap star, one-third English professor, and one-third comics geek (this last part much like Oscar Wao himself, an overweight “third-world ghetto nerd” addicted to sci-fi, D&D and all that, which made me suspect for the first half of the novel that the narrator was really Oscar, disguising himself by using the third person—hope that’s not giving away too much? But the narrator does clearly conceal his identity, motives, and circumstances, from the very beginning of the novel, where he merely refers to himself in role-playing-games fashion as the “Watcher.” I found this mystery voice annoying at first, though I advise you to bear with it: in the end everything makes sense, or at least the choice of narrator does. I think his ability or necessity to alternate between languages, voices, registers (moving sometimes from the lyrical to the vulgar within a sentence), to sound both street-smart and highly literate, to coexist in these multiple spheres that really make up American society, is the whole point. In what might suggest a sort of inverted Great Gatsby, the object of this Dominican Nick Carraway’s admiration is not a handsome social-climber with a collection of great shirts but a homely nerd with negative sex appeal who wants to become the “Dominican Tolkien.” And the Lord of the Rings template fits fascinatingly well over the surrealistic landscape of the Dominican Republic, its macabre dictator Trujillo a real-life Sauron (one of many in the twentieth century). Suburban New Jersey, where the U.S. parts of the story take place, is not exactly the Shire, either…...less

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sydney rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

02/17/08

Read in January, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Okay: Oscar is overweight, greasy, acne-ridden, and enamored of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. He talks like that weird kid who wore a cape and worked at the video store in high school-- the kind of kid who makes you simultaneously hate and pity him, and who you'd never admit secretly intrigues you or makes you laugh or impresses you because he's super smart. Right? Oscar has a terrible time with girls and worries about not being truly Dominican because he's still a virgin. The novel follows hi...more Okay: Oscar is overweight, greasy, acne-ridden, and enamored of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. He talks like that weird kid who wore a cape and worked at the video store in high school-- the kind of kid who makes you simultaneously hate and pity him, and who you'd never admit secretly intrigues you or makes you laugh or impresses you because he's super smart. Right? Oscar has a terrible time with girls and worries about not being truly Dominican because he's still a virgin. The novel follows him from high school to college to his untimely end (I mean, is that a spoiler? The title sort of says it all). It also traces his family history back to his mother's childhood and follows his sister, Lola, through her childhood and young adulthood, too. The concept of "fuku" ("the Curse and the Doom of the New World" (1)) drives the whole story-- basically, each of the narrators deals with whether fuku can be blamed for the tragedies knotted into the family history. To complicate (or illuminate) the story further, Diaz drops crazy footnotes into the text to explain aspects of Dominican history (and highlight some of the origins of fuku superstition). Most of these footnotes deal with the reign of the dictator Trujillo, and, as the story progresses, Diaz reveals intimate connections between the Trujillo and Oscar stories, until the footnotes are as integral to understanding Oscar's life as the story itself.

The only reason I'm not giving this a straight 5 is because I didn't quite understand what was happening in this novel until I was about three-fourths of the way through. Diaz switches narrators every few chapters, and it can be disorienting. But once it clicked into place, the story swept me up and I didn't want to put it down. Until that point, Diaz's aggressive, funny style kept me reading. Just like in Drown, his collection of short stories, this book reads like a story being told at a kitchen table late at night-- the kind you wanted to stay up and hear when you were a kid even though you could barely keep your eyes open and didn't understand half the things the adults were saying... but you knew it was important, and you knew you'd be missing out on something big if you gave up and went to bed.

I feel like I need to re-read this book almost immediately to catch all the things I missed the first time through. It's a great novel. Highly recommended....less

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Andy rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

12/24/07

Read in December, 2007

I bought Oscar Wao as a birthday gift for my mother in October based on scores of sterling reviews. She read it, gave it a mild thumbs-up (probably just being nice) and handed it off to me. Now having read it, I'm pretty mortified I thought this book would be something she might like.

The critical consensus seemed to be that Junot Diaz is a good writer, and he picked a good story to tell here in his first novel. But I found this book lacking on both counts. I found the writing lazy an...more

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David rated it:

(review of isbn 1594489580)

12/20/07

bookshelves: read-in-2007

Read in December, 2007

I enjoyed this book a lot, and think it deserves the good reviews it's received. I just hadn't expected it to be quite as *sad* as it was. Somehow, it wasn't the more obviously depressing aspects (e.g. the persecution and torture that were routinely practiced under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic) that got to me so much as the smaller stuff. The continued failure of the various members of Oscar's family to connect, the accumulated hostility between generations, as well as th...more I enjoyed this book a lot, and think it deserves the good reviews it's received. I just hadn't expected it to be quite as *sad* as it was. Somehow, it wasn't the more obviously depressing aspects (e.g. the persecution and torture that were routinely practiced under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic) that got to me so much as the smaller stuff. The continued failure of the various members of Oscar's family to connect, the accumulated hostility between generations, as well as the meanness and bullying suffered by outsider Oscar throughout, were ultimately more depressing than the earlier, more overtly brutal, events in Santo Domingo.

You keep rooting for Oscar to catch a break and he never really does. Equally depressing was the narrator's ongoing inability to transcend the machisto Latino stereotype of repeated infidelity because of an apparent need to screw any woman that came in range. Only the women are strong in this book, and only one of them appears to be granted a shot at happiness.

Fortunately, the book is not a total descent into darkness - primarily because the main narrator is sympathetic, funny and smart. He provides insightful commentary on Oscar's family affairs (even if he is unable to translate the insights to his own life). Oscar's family history unfolds according to a relatively complicated framework, intercutting past and present scenes using several flashbacks. Handled inexpertly, this has the potential to be confusing and/or irritating*, but Diaz manages it perfectly.

(* The execrable "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" comes to mind.)

A few random comments:

1. Diaz doesn't eschew the apparently obligatory 'magical' element, but I found the symbolism of the mongoose-lion critter in the canefield a bit murky (though I did learn the new word 'chabin(e)' : Person of mixed-blood who appears to bear the characteristics of only the lighter skinned parent; sometimes referred to in English as being "yellow.")

2. I think this book must achieve some kind of record for the number of acknowledgements made by the author. The impulse to thank everyone who ever gave him encouragement is understandable, perhaps even laudable. But I personally would have drawn the line at thanking whole cities (Perth Amboy?)

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James rated it:

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12/17/07

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: Anyone interested in Hispanic American literature

My problem with the book is how tired a lot of its themes feel and how flippant it is about history. It could very well be that we're supposed to treat the narrator as unreliable and by extension scorn his juvenile view of Trujillo's dictatorship. But if that's the case, it's hard for me to read anything else in the book without a little bit of scorn and annoyance. The other side is that maybe all the comic book and sci-fi allusions were meant to make the whole experience of history seem a bi...more My problem with the book is how tired a lot of its themes feel and how flippant it is about history. It could very well be that we're supposed to treat the narrator as unreliable and by extension scorn his juvenile view of Trujillo's dictatorship. But if that's the case, it's hard for me to read anything else in the book without a little bit of scorn and annoyance. The other side is that maybe all the comic book and sci-fi allusions were meant to make the whole experience of history seem a bit distant and strange. I can think of better ways of establishing that feeling, though.

So I was left with either a scorn for the narrator's take on history or a sense that I was supposed to find the past strange but couldn't (maybe it's because I'm pretty familiar with all of the geekdom that the allusions actually made the experience more familiar; in fact, the allusions after all seemed to cheapen the lives of people that actually lived in the time). By the end, I didn't feel as if the book could take any idea seriously, including the superficially vaunted and kind of trite pursuit of selfless love, which seems to destroy anyone it touches in the book. If this is the case and I'm not misreading the book, then it's just another case of postmodern cynicism, a typical rejection of ideals that is also saturated with pop-culture savvy with no purpose other than to simply be thrown in there as a wink and nudge. In the end, I felt the book had no goal other than to say there's nothing but suffering in the pursuit of dreams or the unfulfilled anticipations of the quiet life, and then death.

Unless, of course, I'm totally misreading the novel. I'm open to suggestions on a better way of seeing the book, but as of now, it just seems like a glib way of dismissing dreamers. At the very least, it feels like the book is striving for a definitive message one way or the other and doesn't want to linger in the ambiguity of living in any way (maybe a bit understandable, given the callous atrocities committed by Trujillo).

But like I said, if anyone can bring up a different perspective, I'm open to being convinced otherwise (I did, after all, enjoy his short stories)....less

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Kelly rated it:

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04/08/08

Read in January, 2008

After the first 2 chapters of this book, I would have given it 1 or 2 stars, and to be quite honest would have put it down if my book club hadn't selected it. The work grew on me, though, and now I would even consider giving it a second read in order to repair some of my misconceptions in the early chapters.

The book is ambitious to say the least. It is (as per the title) the story of Oscar Wao, an anti-hero whose excess weight and excess knowledge of sci-fi fantasy only serve to undermine hi...more

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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