The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Read a book from each country

Dec 11, 2008 J rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: latin-american-fiction

I was fortunate enough to hear some guy named Junot Diaz speak in Iowa City last September before this book became huge. I didn't know who the hell he was, but he was foul mouthed, funny and smart as could be. I think that is how I would describe this book. It's got this really nerdy in-your-face style that manages to be constantly endearing rather than just plain abrasive. Below its surface though is a dark contemplation on the terrible ways that familial and political legacies can intertwine w ...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Harry Rutherford rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: around-the-world, caribbean-reading-challenge, caribbean

I really enjoyed this one; it’s lively, full of energy. Funny. It’s written in a colloquial style, sprinkled with slang, bits of Spanish and SF references.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel about a Dominican family in New Jersey. Oscar himself, obese and nerdy, was born in New York, but the book interleaves his story with the family history; his mother’s life in the Dominican Republic, then further back again to tell the story of her parents. It is, among other things, about the imm I really enjoyed this one; it’s lively, full of energy. Funny. It’s written in a colloquial style, sprinkled with slang, bits of Spanish and SF references.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel about a Dominican family in New Jersey. Oscar himself, obese and nerdy, was born in New York, but the book interleaves his story with the family history; his mother’s life in the Dominican Republic, then further back again to tell the story of her parents. It is, among other things, about the immigrant experience, about being a Dominican in New Jersey but always slightly an outsider in the DR. And what it means to be Dominican anyway if you can’t live up to the stereotype, if you are in fact a fat nerd. And the sections about his family before they left the DR, there are other things: life under dictatorship and so on.

Glancing over the Goodreads reviews, they seem to mainly trend towards OMG this is teh best novel EVAR with a sprinkling of people who are irritated by one or other of the books quirks: the heavy use of Spanglish, the footnotes, the multiple narrators, the fact that the book is only partly about what the title says it’s about. One of the people in my mother’s book group apparently disliked it because he likes books to start at the beginning and then go in a straight line to the end.

You probably have a pretty good idea before you start what your tolerance is like for that kind of thing; personally the non-linear narrative and the various narrative voices don’t bother me at all, and while I’m not a big fan of footnotes in novels they weren’t especially irritating in this book. The Spanglish/Spanish was more of a problem for me personally because I don’t know any Spanish, and while a combination of context and the remnants of the French and Latin I learned in school were enough to deduce what some words meant, whole sentences were generally beyond me. I’m certainly not suggesting that he shouldn’t have used the Spanish, and it added to my enjoyment more than it spoiled it, but I was probably missing out on a lot of what was going on. Caveat emptor.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as best book EVAR either; I don’t think it’s even the best novel I’ve read this year, and I’ve only read two. But I did thoroughly enjoy it. Here’s an extract:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz is my book from the Dominican Republic for the Read The World challenge, and is my second book for the Caribbean Reading Challenge.

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Aug 20, 2008 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: page-turners

Although I've been leery of Pulitzer winners for some time now, I decided to pick up Oscar Wao by weight of its subject alone. I have spent a good deal of time reading Caribbean literature with a specific eye for Haitian and Dominican variety. Worth a shot, I figure.

i got a lot of what I signed up for. It was an absorbing read, funny and irreverent toward subjects that would have thrown less balanced contemporary writers into a meladramatic frenzy of carefully calculated sickly-sachrine spiritua ...more

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Jun 11, 2009 Cheryl rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012-olympics-challenge, pulitzer-prize

The character studies in this book were amazing. I found the weaving of the past and the present effective. I was grateful for my 13 hours of college Spanish, though, because Diaz intersperses Spanish sentences in with English sentences (and they are never footnoted so that non-Spanish speakers fully understand what has been said). Much of the Spanish are extremely vulgar language...and this book is not one for those who do not want to read vulgarity and adult content.

Especially interesting for ...more

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Mar 06, 2009 Agnes rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: immigrant-experience, latin-america

Strong beginning, then story drops off a bit, pulls back together in the middle and finishes not that well. I was fine with the narrative structure, the Spanish text, and the historical background of the country and the family but it didn't come together as well as the first 50 pages in the rest of the book. The characterizations were very piercing especially those of Oscar, Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral, Beli and La Inca. The fuku ever-present and almost always determining the way the story goes make ...more

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Aug 30, 2009 Jodi rated it it was ok

Not sure what to think about this one - very sad. I liked the story line and really felt for Oscar and his bad luck/circumstances. I kept hoping he would succeed! However, the title kind of gives away the ending. I did not like all of the ethnic and racial slurs though.

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Aug 01, 2009 Joanne rated it really liked it

fast-paced, had a rhythm to it almost like spoken word. First time I read a book with the word "diaspora" in it since college. It made me happy. ...more

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