The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [Hardcover]

 

 

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a family saga about identity, love, loss, oppression, hexes, sexuality, and fate. Don't give up during the first 50 pages where Oscar, the fat science-fiction and fantasy aficionado Dominican-American in the ghetto, is introduced . . . it's the least interesting part of the book.

From there, you will be transported into the past and future lives of Oscar's sister, mother, aunts, grandparents, and college roommate. Those lives are, in part, shared to present the history of the evil, repressive regime of Trujillo and its heirs in the Dominican Republic. The stories shared in this book rival anything you've read about the disappeared ones in Argentina.

Any book with such a sad point needs a little levity to release the reader's emotions. Junot Diaz accomplishes that result by having Oscar be the most unRomeo-like Romeo you can imagine.

Beneath the story line, the book asks a classic question: How much should we suffer for love?

Oscar is in many ways a modern Don Quixote who is troubled by having sexual desires as well as platonic ones. The humor is more subdued, but the parallels are striking.

If all you know about the Dominican Republic is that great baseball players come from there, you'll be pleased with this story. It's sweet and sad at the same time.

If you don't know Spanish, keep a dictionary handy. You won't quite know what some of the references are otherwise.

As the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Junot Diaz falls into an elite category of authors that includes Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Eugenides and Richard Russo. I have to admit, though, that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao fell short of the mark; while I appreciated artistry of the novel, I didn't particularly enjoy it. In the first 50 pages, Diaz introduces Oscar, the obese, nerdy and entirely unlikable protagonist. It's a dry beginning but the book does improve when it delves into the lives of Oscar's sister, mother, grandparents and friends. As well as a family saga, the novel chronicles the era of the oppressive reign of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. While the book successfully (and sometimes humourously) weaves together themes of identity, love, loss and fate, I found it gratuitously vulgar and uncaptivating. And as for its underlying question: how much suffering is love worth? I certainly wouldn't heed the advice of any of its characters!

I really love novels that intertwine different meta-narratives in order to tell the whole story.I think this is a feat that is not easily undertaken, and there are only a handful of authors that I've come across that can partake in storytelling from diverse perspectives, getting us to understand the internal logic of the different characters. I think Diaz has done this well. He does it all with a dash of edginess and dark humour, and incorporates history and culture into the story. He does shy away from any grandiose political statements, and talks about the horror of the reign of the Trujillo regime from a rather personalistic perspective (a la Trujillo was just a bad freakin' dude), as opposed to a more structural perspective, which is a bit annoying for those that know anything about the history of Latin American and US-propped dictatorships. I understand that a political statement was not his intention, though, although it did deal at length with racial relations.

While I enjoyed the meta-narratives and characterization of the book, oddly enough, I didn't dig on Oscar all that much. Someone else mentioned here that he was a stock character of the fat, science fiction-loving, introverted, sex/love-challenged variety, and I must agree. I had a hard time having any empathy for him, and read the book mostly for the other characters (I found his sister and especially his mother's stories interesting). When he was interactions with other characters, it's always in this obscure space-speak, variations of some middle-earth or extraterrestrial-like dialect. Who talks like this? Even geeks can relate more to people than this, no? Maybe Diaz thinks that he has un-stocked the stock character by combining two apparently contradictory identity traits: Loner, fat, game-less freak meets Dominicano (who are apparently renowned for their ability to procure punani). This might make him somewhat less cliché, but I still can't garner a whole lot of empathy for the dude. As the narrative changes, it is alternately told from a 1st person perspective (Oscar's sister, and Oscar's college roommate), and from a Greek chorus-like "we" perspective. Maybe it's because Oscar never gets to explain himself, but he just seems completely unable to relate to anyone, and Diaz doesn't really get into his head. He just kind of describes his life (which by and large consists of writing novels, and not getting laid) from the outside. It's hard to root for a character for whom you feel rather indifferent, and who has not been adequately dissected. We can understand why Lola (his sister) and Beli (his mom) are the way they are. I can't understand Oscar, and after reading, I was too annoyed with him to want to.

In fact, all the male characters in this book were underdeveloped in my opinion, and the female characters much more complex. From a male author, I'm not quite sure why this is, but it is. In any case, Diaz does a good job highlighting the rather schizophrenic identity to which diaspora gives rise, and I appreciated his humour, lack of pretension, diverse narratives as well as insight about race, and his ability to shed light on how people from the "old country" think. Would definitely recommend it.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Haunted by an Horrific Past
Much of the content of this high-powered novel about the life and times of Oscar and his Dominican family has already been mentioned in other reviews, so I have decided to take a... Read more

Published 8 months ago by Ian Gordon Malcomson

5.0 out of 5 stars Great story.
It was a very enjoyable read and I highly recommend it to others. It grabbed my attention right from the first pages and held it until the end. Read more

Published 11 months ago by Bookluvr

3.0 out of 5 stars Loved Oscar but the book failed to win me Over
I enjoyed this story of Oscar de Leon, an American born boy of Dominican heritage. Oscar is one of those people who just don't fit in. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Heather Pearson

3.0 out of 5 stars At once creative and flat
Let me say, before I begin here, that I had very high expectations going into this novel. Not because it won the Pulitzer, but because a friend whose reading habits I respect... Read more

Published on April 17 2009 by J. Tobin Garrett

5.0 out of 5 stars To Die for Love
A tragic but richly written novel about identity, discrimination, injustice, torture, and death but the moral of the story is about love. Read more

Published on April 2 2009 by Coach C

4.0 out of 5 stars I've always maintained...
...that a writer has to possess a certain 'arrogance' in order to write a novel. Because it requires so much effort just to complete one, you simply HAVE TO have this arrogance,... Read more

Published on Dec 19 2008 by Schmadrian

5.0 out of 5 stars Well Deserved Pulitzer Winner
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead Books 2007)

Brilliant, acerbic and filled with the love of revenge that writers are famous for:... Read more

Published on Oct 16 2008 by Jeffrey Round

3.0 out of 5 stars Dominican Family Saga
I had some problems warming up to this book. It is not a cozy read. The book starts out telling us about Oscar and his childhood. Read more

Published on Oct 13 2008 by Teddy

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