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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297673.The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1184963635m/297673.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297673.The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/55215.Junot_D_az">Junot Díaz</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21906546?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 4 of 5 stars 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.
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1120278?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Justin's review
rating:

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, narrat...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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